I think a major part of it is a lack of knowledge of history among many people in computer science and software engineering, even researchers. Alan Kay, the cr

I think a major part of it is a lack of knowledge of history among many people in computer science and software engineering, even researchers. Alan Kay, the creator of the Smalltalk programming language and one of my personal heroes, has lamented many times over the years that a "pop culture" has developed in the software engineering and computer science world. This culture is focused on the present and often disregards the past. It's more than the overloading of terminology like "Web 3.0" and "fourth-generation programming languages." It's an overall attitude that focuses solely on the fad du jour and lacks a deeper understanding of computing. I've noticed a lack of knowledge of computing history among many people who work in computing professions. Personally I think all undergraduate students of computer science and related disciplines would benefit immensely from a one-semester history of computing course. They'd start by learning about early analog computing devices before learning about two very crucial developments in the 1930's and 1940's: (1) the invention of early digital computers such as the ENIAC, and (2) meta-mathematics and how that led to Godel's incompleteness theorem, the lambda calculus, Turing machines, and other fundamental concepts that underpin theoretical computer science. Then they'd learn about the rise of the computer industry, the history of software, the history of high-level programming languages, the history of AI, advances in computer architecture, the birth of the Internet, the GUI, the World Wide Web, social networking, and modern topics such as deep neural networks and large language models. It would be a lot of ground to cover and it would be impossible to cover everything in just a single course, but the goal of such a course is for practitioners in computer science and software engineering to have a basic understanding of the history of their profession and why things are the way that they are today. I also believe that those fortunate enough to work in or visit Silicon Valley should make a visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to get a taste of how far computing has come in just a relatively short amount of time compared to all of human history.