Comment by oytis
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.
FWIW, neural networks would be in that pool until relatively recently.
If we change "definitely don't work" to "have the following so far insurmountable challenges", it addresses cases like this. Hardware scaling limitations on neural networks have been known to be a limitation for a long time - Minsky and Papert touched in this in Perceptrons in 1969.
The Hall would then end up containing a spectrum ranging from useless ideas to hard problems. Distinguishing between the two based on documented challenges would likely be possible in many cases.