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I posit that most tech companies make money by poorly recreating old technologies for use by younger people ignorant of the old ones. E.g. how many variants of

I posit that most tech companies make money by poorly recreating old technologies for use by younger people ignorant of the old ones. E.g. how many variants of IRC have we had now? Usenet? VMs?

hinkley 3y ago
I think we need history classes in programming, and possibly comparative literature classes but for code.
- jjav 3y ago
  I've long been a proponent of computing history as required part of CS. Progress is supposed to work by standing on the shoulder of giants. But that only works if engineers are aware of what came before, how it worked, what was good and bad about it. In the software world the same things are continuously being reinvented but the lessons of the past are not integrated because the inventors have no knowledge of the past 10 times the same thing was done. So every lesson has to be learned anew in production. That's not progress.
- ancantus 3y ago
  Some places have them. I took an elective class at university which focused on open source philosophy & licenses. Read and discussed a bunch of papers written by the guys involved in the early open source movement. Stopped short of code review though: which would have been a nice addition. A very very good paper, and one that was clearly a passion project for the prof.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  I had something like that, that is how I upgraded myself from a UNIX zealot into a Xerox PARC one, as I discovered an alternative universe. Additionaly the campus library was a treasure trove from computing books all the way back in time, and many of us dived into them.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    The distributed computing class had a history of distributed computing component. But it was an elective, and as I found once I got into the real world, one that most people either opted out of or didn't have the option to take. I spend way too much time providing Cliff's Notes to a class I took almost thirty years ago.

I posit that most tech companies make money by poorly recreating old technologies for use by younger people ignorant of the old ones. E.g. how many variants of IRC have we had now? Usenet? VMs?

hinkley 3y ago

I think we need history classes in programming, and possibly comparative literature classes but for code.

jjav 3y ago
I've long been a proponent of computing history as required part of CS. Progress is supposed to work by standing on the shoulder of giants. But that only works if engineers are aware of what came before, how it worked, what was good and bad about it. In the software world the same things are continuously being reinvented but the lessons of the past are not integrated because the inventors have no knowledge of the past 10 times the same thing was done. So every lesson has to be learned anew in production. That's not progress.
ancantus 3y ago
Some places have them. I took an elective class at university which focused on open source philosophy & licenses. Read and discussed a bunch of papers written by the guys involved in the early open source movement. Stopped short of code review though: which would have been a nice addition. A very very good paper, and one that was clearly a passion project for the prof.
pjmlp 3y ago
I had something like that, that is how I upgraded myself from a UNIX zealot into a Xerox PARC one, as I discovered an alternative universe. Additionaly the campus library was a treasure trove from computing books all the way back in time, and many of us dived into them.
- hinkley 3y ago
  The distributed computing class had a history of distributed computing component. But it was an elective, and as I found once I got into the real world, one that most people either opted out of or didn't have the option to take. I spend way too much time providing Cliff's Notes to a class I took almost thirty years ago.