The Hacker Community's greatest flaw -- a total disregard for predecessors -- may also be its saving grace. On one hand, we guffaw at those "old timers" who wo

The Hacker Community's greatest flaw -- a total disregard for predecessors -- may also be its saving grace. On one hand, we guffaw at those "old timers" who worked in assembler, Fortran, C, or even Perl. "They could never have even imagined what they were missing," we might think to ourselves as we re-discover continuation-passing style while coding our latest, greatest node.js-based file server. On the other hand, I think there's a good chance that Alexandra, and the rest of the next generation of programmers, will one day think that "rockstars", "ninjas", and "brogrammers" are as ridiculous and outdated as talking sock-puppets or anthropomorphic paperclips.