4 ms·

We are all taking stuff that ML had 40 years ago, or maybe Lisp 50 years ago. I wish the debates around language features could just get past the idea that lan

• nradov 4y ago
  As an industry we have amnesia. Many developers, including programming language designers, are simply unaware of what was done decades ago and thus end up reinventing the wheel. Before jumping into writing new code we should develop the discipline to start by researching what has been done before in similar domains. Even if the old code isn't reusable we can often apply the same design patterns or at least avoid making the same mistakes.
  • robertlagrant 4y ago
    Sure, but I think you forget: we aren't the first industry to have amnesia.
  • lenkite 4y ago
    It is just simply too hard to read several hundred papers and do bin-surfing to find out what was done in the historical past of computing and grab the timeless ideas. We need government/grant supported researchers and tech writers who can do this work and create a curated, focused bunch of books describing the best methods and designs. I found the Architecture of Open Source Apps to be amazing, but we need something regularly maintained for all software domains.
• javier2 4y ago
  In that case you need to look at the people designing java/C# in the 90s.