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Tech is strangely ahistorical. Not just practitioners not reading the literature, but it seemingly being forgotten entirely. Possibly this is a side effect of so many of us being self-taught.

In another thread I've just been arguing with someone who thought that the DOOM code should have been thread-safe.



I would say cyclical. Every day we read about a similar framework working in a popular language when that solution already existed for long time.

But this happens in other areas outside computer science. For example, modern medicine rediscovering old medicine "recipes".

The problem in our field is when people talk all day about Docker while surpressing LXC from the discussion.


I think it happens for different reasons though.

With medicine it boils down to a dismissal of folk remedies as placebo.

But with computing its because the old ways were developed on mainframes and minicomputers in an environment that current generation may only have heard stories about.

This because the micro-computer era was pretty much a mental reboot for computing, as little if any software crossed over (until fairly recently).


i think being a young industry doesn't help with that regard either. Think about how the medical industry was in the middle ages! And tech is even younger than that time - a mere 70 or so years tops.


That is why I always look forward new technologies. We are very far away from reaching any tipping point.

Regarding IT history, on my case it helps to have been part of it since the mid-80s and my history desire to delve into available documentation from Egyptian, Greek, Roman days and apply the same process to IT.




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