Comment by mpalmer
10 days ago
> Because virtually all software is not novel.
That isn't true, not by a long shot. Improvements happen because someone is inspired to do something differently.
How will that ever happen if we're obsessed with proving we can reimplement shit that's already great?
At the code level it's still rehashing the same ideas over and over again. I wrote lots of things from software 3d on a weird system to jit to websites to telephony software to compilers to firmware for hardware to cloud orchestration and many other things and none of this was novel - someone wrote every single pattern from them before even if nobody put them together the same way. Putting known pieces together is not novel. And as a proportion, almost all software produced is just business apps of various types, with absolutely nothing novel in them.
Also from actual researchers, I know just one person who did something actually novel and it was with queuing.
> At the code level it's still rehashing the same ideas over and over again.
I agree that rehashing the same ideas over and over again is sufficient - for some strange, complacent definition of the word. It's not the only way to think about the discipline, and thank goodness enough smart people realize that.
> Also from actual researchers, I know just one person who did something actually novel and it was with queuing.
Think how many people have to be trying at any given time for it to happen at all.