Isn't this kind of like wishing that we could apply the lessons of the fallen Roman Republic to present-day America? It has the same problems: the historical c

Isn't this kind of like wishing that we could apply the lessons of the fallen Roman Republic to present-day America? It has the same problems: the historical context is imperfect and very tedious to understand (for those who even try). Reinventing the wheel is always easier, cognitively (perhaps while being vaguely cognizant of how there was a Roman Republic that fell to dictatorship that then fractured into hundreds of apocalyptic Christian fiefdoms and how there was an incident with this thing called Therac-25 [and maybe crystallizing that cognizance in proper government standards for medical software]). Also, since the bottleneck is brain bandwidth, it's not helpful that old code is written in old languages which were formulated in a time where the most salient bottleneck was memory/processing speed.