3 ms·

Quite a nice excerpt, will be reading the article now. We almost always discount the work done by our predecessors: NIH-syndrome/"reinventing the wheel" vs "st

• gumby 7y ago
  > We almost always discount the work done by our predecessors: NIH-syndrome/"reinventing the wheel" vs "standing in the shoulders of giants", and this was a humble reminder for me. "We" being computer scientists (or computing) which for some reason has this disease, perhaps due to the field's newness? When I worked in the life sciences (pharmaceutical chemistry) the literature was the first place we looked. Whereas when working at a research lab in my 20s: I would often go down to our library and read CACM, IEEE journal et al and would sometimes implement things I read there. Even though I would brandish a photocopy of the journal article and reference it in the source code my boss and colleagues would praise me for "thinking up" a solution to a given problem. Ironically the Internet changed things dramatically in the physical sciences (in Physics especially* but in other physical sciences by making it much easier to both search and read the literature) whereas in non-academic computing it's been the small conferences and, to my surprise, Youtube. * Physics has long been an innovator in information dissemination; when journal publishing got too slow and letters too point-to-point it gave rise to Physics Letters, which itself became a pair of journals....