Thank you for referencing this outstanding historical presentation. Perhaps one day we shall get out of this strange amnesia software engineering seems to have

Thank you for referencing this outstanding historical presentation. Perhaps one day we shall get out of this strange amnesia software engineering seems to have as a field (or pop culture as Alan Kay poignantly put it). I find it odd I discover the good stuff only when I have practiced programming over ten years while I consider myself a fairly voracious autodidact. Why is it that we are offered snake oil like UML, RUP, GoF patterns and other cargo cult or just otherwise trite nonsense when these basic ingredients of proper programming - simplicity, understandability, minimization of labour, difficulty of reusability - seem to come as great surprise and revelation only after working quite some time. I find the reusability fallacy particularly offensive as a trumpeted design paradigm since it's so hard to get it right, especially since it is often sold as a project feature based on the hypothesis of cost savings. If one achieves practical reusability in ones components, that is a thing to be celebrated, truly. But you cannot say, we shall write this generic domain specific widget _ and make it reusable _ without the understading that this will probably need a lot more design and research than just implementing the domain widget as a stand alone module.