> I also have the impression that CS papers all too often recapitulate the topic's history. It's not really about history so much as context. Usually, you want

> I also have the impression that CS papers all too often recapitulate the topic's history. It's not really about history so much as context. Usually, you want to set up a paper with "This is the state of X as it exists right now, but there exists this problem Y. We solve Y by starting from X and making Z advancement." I think part of the issue is CS is exceptionally young (less than 100 years total, really), and the other part is how rapidly it's advanced and diversified in that time (in terms of individual disciplines even within subfields). Without the context, I can't readily jump to a paper from an adjacent-but-not-directly-relevant subfield without needing to look up a bunch of other stuff. And it's not as straightforward to know where to look to find the relevant information. A paper 10 years old might be state-of-the-art or it might be completely outdated, and it's hard to know which if you're not immersed in that discipline. Having the context in the paper itself is a big help to ameliorating this.