Comment by roldie

10 years ago

This is quite fascinating. All these practices are touted as modern design techniques, however they were being done over 20 years ago.

6 comments

roldie

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blakeyrat  10 years ago

We're in an industry where absolutely nobody learns anything from the past.

People going to school to learn software development don't spend a week on DOS, a week on Novell 4, then a week on Macintosh 6.0.8, then a week on Windows 98, a week on BeOS, etc. There's no history education at all. No learning from past ideas. Not even any conception of history, really.

Compare it to, for example, a film class. Students learning how to create films watch films. They watch films from the 1910s, the 1930s, the 1950s, etc. They learn how their industry changed and matured over time. They get a solid sense of history, and an appreciation for their forebears. Software developers get none of that.

Anyway, this shouldn't come as a surprise, is what I'm getting at.

  • dragonwriter  10 years ago

    > People going to school to learn software development don't

    ...usually have offered anything that even purports to be a "software development" curriculum.

    They usually have a "computer science" curriculum.

Sharlin  10 years ago

It's an unfortunate aspect of the human condition that every generation, in their youthful defiance, ends up discarding some of their forebears' painstakingly accumulated wisdom, only to rediscover it later (of course crediting themselves for the discovery). To paraphrase Santanaya, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to reinvent it.