Comment by cyberax
11 hours ago
"Traced back" is fine. We can trace back the size of the Shuttle's boosters to the width of the roads in the Roman Empire.
Insisting that the problems of 1960 are the only thing that matters, and MUST be solved dogmatically is not.
Well, a lot of ideas (and I mean really a lot) from the sixties are still very relevant today, and indeed, there are also problems discovered in the sixties still waiting for a solution. We don't have to live in the past, but many "new" things aren't actually new, or are not better just because they are new.
Of course. Problems that existed in 60-s were very real. And structured programming was an improvement over messy gotos.
At the same time, software from 1960-s did not have to deal with a lot of error conditions. When all you have is infallible computation code, you tend to overlook handling cleanups and exceptions. It was also single-threaded, so there was no focus on locking/mutability.
And it turns out that dealing with both of these requires stepping away from pure structured programming with one nice happy path and a single return.