"Those who do not learn from history, are doomed to repeat it."--misappropriated from George Santayana. Without a solitary shred of evidence to support my conj

"Those who do not learn from history, are doomed to repeat it."--misappropriated from George Santayana. Without a solitary shred of evidence to support my conjecture, I claim that the problem is that programmers are given a smattering of information about how to use some tools, but are not taught about the progression of tools over time. The history of programming languages is a history of attempts to solve various problems and a history of various design trade-offs. Deprived of this basic grounding, young programmers are constantly rediscovering the good and the bad, and the Internet gives us a constant stream of their revelatory essays, all of which can be summarized as "Babies vs. Bathwater: Fight!"