Comment by Folcon
7 days ago
> Maybe software engineering should have some sort of "Hall of Ideas That Definitely Don't Work", so that young people entering the field could save their time on implementing one more incarnation of an already known not good idea.
I'm deeply curious to know how you could easily and definitively work out what is and is not an idea that "Definitely Don't Work"
Mathematics and Computer Science seem to be littered with unworkable ideas that have made a comeback when someone figured out how to make them work.
Well, "Hall of Ideas That Are So Difficult To Make Work Well That They May Not In Fact Be Much Use" doesn't roll off the tongue as smoothly.
What this Hall could contain, for each idea, is a list of reasons why the idea has failed in the past. That would at least give future Quixotes something to measure their efforts by.
Ok, so better documentation about what was tried, why, how it failed so as to make obvious if it's viable to try again or not.
I can get behind that :)...