Well like I said... I enjoy history. but. I've never used history to solve business problems.
They are related and good to know... but I don't need to know history to flip burgers, run a business or plan my next sprint.
I'm not arguing history is unimportant or good to know or even possibly useful just to have ideas of what to do - or what not to do... I'm just arguing it's importance is over-emphasized.
Just feels like you’re arguing that only short term memory matters. Have you never encountered a problem that became easy once you talked to someone with more background on the problem than you?
Why would you want to handicap yourself or your field by making it harder to “talk” to those a little bit further before you?
Your building is resting on their foundations whether you acknowledge it or not. They may have had a solution for the problem you’re facing.
> I've never used history to solve business problems.
As Knuth was trying to point out, history should be more than tables and time lines.
It should provide details of how important advances where made and how solutions to big problems where found.
And the reason being, since those historical details aren't being recorded, it's more than likely you are in fact solving business problems today using the same techniques discovered in the past, you just don't know it.
What I see is not over-emphasizing the importance of history but de-emphasizing it as a justification for present day sufficiency.
If you don't like the term, use another one. But without history you're bound to cargo cult computer science where what you have to do next is plan your sprint. Why do you need a sprint anyway? You might never know if you need a sprint any more if you don't know what problem was it supposed to fix.
You don't use history to solve the problems. You use history to find when people were fighting similar problems. Then, you link that to when other people solved still similar problems. And you look for what changed between, to see if you can leverage that.
At the junior programmer levels yes that can be true. At the principal engineer levels it’s not true. At that level you have to invent new ways of doing things when existing ways don’t cut it. Looking into the past is super charging.
none of my statements goes against learning history.
I probably don't do as much as I could/should... but I am a successful programmer who has never needed "history" to understand basic programming principles.
I seem to consider history and good engineering to be different topics while everyone else seems to think you can't understand Big O, YAGNI, SOLID, the difference between Functional Programming and Procedural programing, etc, etc, etc without understanding the history of how assembly turned into c...
Because History is interesting... but not needed to be a good engineer and a good programmer.
They are related and good to know... but I don't need to know history to flip burgers, run a business or plan my next sprint.
I'm not arguing history is unimportant or good to know or even possibly useful just to have ideas of what to do - or what not to do... I'm just arguing it's importance is over-emphasized.