The Continuous Amnesia Issue
============================
by Uwe Friedrichsen
October 2, 2020

As an industry we continuously forget what we have learned

The continuous amnesia issue
============================
In this post I want to discuss an issue that I, being for a longer
time in IT meanwhile, observe over and over again. It is the
observation that as an industry we continuously forget what we have
learned.

What do I mean with that claim?

The very first discussion--again and again and ...
==================================================
Probably I best illustrate this by sharing an experience I had. About
two years ago I attended an unconference. It was not the first time I
attended it. I liked it a lot. It always had a very energetic
atmosphere. The participants were very active, loved to share and
discuss. But unlike the previous times, I decided to do something
different that year.

As an experiment, I decided not to share myself, not to offer
sessions myself where I drive the topic of discussion, but to listen
only. I know that this is not the idea of an unconference, but I was
curious. As I wrote: It was a little experiment, I wanted to conduct.

I knew that always a very active group of people gathered at this
unconference and I wanted to use that as an unbiased opportunity to
learn about the state of IT, how people think about topics, what
moves them, and so on. So, I looked forward to what I would learn.

To be frank, it was a devastating experience for me.

The session that really killed it was a session about reusability. A
group of people came together to discuss reusability. I was really
curious as I dealt with the topic for many years already. A great
community. A topic I am particularly interested in. I was looking
forward to learning something new. I did not expect a lot of new
ideas, but maybe one or two.

So, I listened ... and could not believe what I heard.

The discussion moved at a level as if nobody ever had said or written
a single word about reusability in the past 50 years. I felt set back
to a pre-1968 discussion, set back to a time before the NATO Software
Engineering Conferences were held. Where had all the ideas about
reusability from the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s and all the years
after gone?

Obviously, nobody in the room ever had heard anything about what we
as an industry already had figured out about reusability. They
discussed the topic completely from scratch, and due to that in a
totally naive way, not touching any of the important learning of the
last 50 years. I sat there listening and did not understand what
happened. I felt the urge to jump up and scream: "Shut up, all of
you! You do not know sh*t about reusability!"

Of course, I did not. Besides the fact that it would have been very
rude, it also would have been unfair.

As I wrote before: It was a very active community that gathered
there, all of them adding with their best intentions to a vibrant
discussion. So, I eventually decided to leave. Not all sessions felt
as devastating as this one but I had similar experiences in most of
the sessions I attended.

I was quite confused and had a lot to ponder. I went to the
conference to learn something new and ... well, I learned something
new. But it was definitely not what I expected to learn. I learned
that the people in the sessions I attended did not seem to have any
knowledge about the discussions that we had before in our industry
about the very topics.

Continuous collective amnesia
=============================
What happened? It kept me a while thinking. Eventually, I realized
that I had observed a disease of our whole industry in its purest
form: We continuously forget what we have learned. We always reinvent
everything from scratch. My personal observation is that discussions
in the IT community start over about every 5 years [1]. That is how
long we remember as a community. After that we need to rediscover
your insights from scratch.

Or how I like to phrase it in a bit provocative way:

> In IT, we suffer from continuous collective amnesia and we are even
> proud of it! [2]

Again, this is not about the people who discussed in that room. All
of them did their best, they eagerly discussed hoping to gather new
insights. They were simply victims of a widespread disease in IT:

> We do not value the wisdom of the past.

We suffer from extreme youth obsession, not only regarding the age of
people but also regarding how we value knowledge. Old knowledge is
considered "worthless", while new knowledge is considered "great".

A tweet that Mark, founder of Bitmen Studios sent me in a little
conversion we had via Twitter IMO really nicely describes the
effect:

> My point here is rather not searching for a unique "best" solution
> but everywhere software devs across the globe are solving the
> "same" problem again and again (and fall into the same pitfalls).
> The increase in tech needed and the associated complexity amplifies
> that problem.

We reinvent the wheel over and over again, making the same mistakes
again and again, not learning as a community. And as Mark correctly
pointed out, the growing technology complexity amplifies the
problem--and, as I would like to add, vice versa: Our continuous
collective amnesia amplifies our growing complexity problem.

Why is it this way? Why do we loose our collective memory every
5 years?

I am not sure about the causes. My current attempt of an explanation
consists of 5 factors:

1. We consider ourselves a dynamic, fast moving industry. New
concepts, tools and technologies emerge every day. How can
knowledge of yesterday still be applicable to problems of today?
That is what we keep telling ourselves. We wallow in our perceived
vigor and speed of innovation, neglecting that we keep solving the
same problems over and over again, just with different tools and
technologies. Yes, some things change, but usually 80%+ of the
problems stay the same. But we refuse to see that. We prefer
considering ourselves the "masters of new".

2. We are technology believers. We are convinced that we can solve
any problem by simply applying the right tool or technology. E.g.,
if people have a collaboration problem, the typical reflex is to
look for a tool that solves the problem, neglecting that it almost
certainly is not a tool problem. The same is true for all other
kinds of problems. Whenever we face a non-trivial problem, we try
to solve it by applying a tool or technology to it instead of
solving the actual problem. This has become such a natural pattern
that we do not realize it anymore. And as past tools and
technologies did not solve the problem, we look for new ones.

3. Insights grow slower than knowledge. Our knowledge continuously
grows, the longer we work in IT. Of course, not everything we
learn is valuable. Quite often we learn that some of our knowledge
is plain crap. If I, e.g., think back to SOA: Wow, what a crap!
Would never do it again this way! But not everything was bad. I
also took some great insights from the SOA times. It takes times
to separate the wheat from the chaff. In the beginning of our
careers we basically learn new stuff all the time. It takes some
years until we start to see the recurring patterns, to separate
real insights from plain knowledge.

4. We face a continuous stream of new developers. I feel as if I face
a new generation of developers every 5 years [3]. Maybe that is a
very subjective experience. But for me, people just coming from
their IT education, being 5 years in business, 10 years or 15
years and more feel very different, like different generations.
All those new people in IT have to build their own insights from
scratch. They have nothing to build on as in IT we created a
cult(ure) of new, celebrating the new and despising the old.

5. If you combine the "cult of new" with what I call "the arrogance
of the youth", you get an explosive mixture. Before you think that
I want to talk bad about younger people: I just talk from personal
experience. I was a graduate myself years ago and believe me: I
was arrogant! I knew better! I had to learn humbleness the hard
way, and I am still not sure if I arrived (it is a lot easier to
judge an old self than to judge the current self). So, I do not
want to reproach any young person for being somewhat arrogant. I
guess that is natural and also healthy to a certain degree because
it helps against persisting in outdated ideas as an industry. But
in a culture of new, this habit works as an unhealthy accelerant.

If we put these factors together, we end up with an environment where
we only value new things and despise old things. If we face a
problem, we never look if someone solved the same problem before [4].
We only look for a shiny new solution, ideally a new tool or
technology. If we learn a good solution for a problem, we forget it
after a few years and start again from scratch.

It is not that individuals do not learn and do not grow insights.
They do.

But as a community, we do not.

I agree. Many have been the tims when the tiniest company with the tiniest
application has insisted on moving it over to k8s, when a regular VM with
a classic LAMP-stack (or equivalent) would have done a better and more
reliable job, for a vastly lower price.

But oh no, everything has to be k8s these days, even if the service only
has 10 local users that just use a web frontend to enter data in a
database.

On Mon, 15 Apr 2024, Ben Collver wrote:

> The Continuous Amnesia Issue
> ============================
> by Uwe Friedrichsen
> October 2, 2020
>
> As an industry we continuously forget what we have learned
>
> The continuous amnesia issue
> ============================
> In this post I want to discuss an issue that I, being for a longer
> time in IT meanwhile, observe over and over again. It is the
> observation that as an industry we continuously forget what we have
> learned.
>
> What do I mean with that claim?
>
> The very first discussion--again and again and ...
> ==================================================
> Probably I best illustrate this by sharing an experience I had. About
> two years ago I attended an unconference. It was not the first time I
> attended it. I liked it a lot. It always had a very energetic
> atmosphere. The participants were very active, loved to share and
> discuss. But unlike the previous times, I decided to do something
> different that year.
>
> As an experiment, I decided not to share myself, not to offer
> sessions myself where I drive the topic of discussion, but to listen
> only. I know that this is not the idea of an unconference, but I was
> curious. As I wrote: It was a little experiment, I wanted to conduct.
>
> I knew that always a very active group of people gathered at this
> unconference and I wanted to use that as an unbiased opportunity to
> learn about the state of IT, how people think about topics, what
> moves them, and so on. So, I looked forward to what I would learn.
>
> To be frank, it was a devastating experience for me.
>
> The session that really killed it was a session about reusability. A
> group of people came together to discuss reusability. I was really
> curious as I dealt with the topic for many years already. A great
> community. A topic I am particularly interested in. I was looking
> forward to learning something new. I did not expect a lot of new
> ideas, but maybe one or two.
>
> So, I listened ... and could not believe what I heard.
>
> The discussion moved at a level as if nobody ever had said or written
> a single word about reusability in the past 50 years. I felt set back
> to a pre-1968 discussion, set back to a time before the NATO Software
> Engineering Conferences were held. Where had all the ideas about
> reusability from the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s and all the years
> after gone?
>
> Obviously, nobody in the room ever had heard anything about what we
> as an industry already had figured out about reusability. They
> discussed the topic completely from scratch, and due to that in a
> totally naive way, not touching any of the important learning of the
> last 50 years. I sat there listening and did not understand what
> happened. I felt the urge to jump up and scream: "Shut up, all of
> you! You do not know sh*t about reusability!"
>
> Of course, I did not. Besides the fact that it would have been very
> rude, it also would have been unfair.
>
> As I wrote before: It was a very active community that gathered
> there, all of them adding with their best intentions to a vibrant
> discussion. So, I eventually decided to leave. Not all sessions felt
> as devastating as this one but I had similar experiences in most of
> the sessions I attended.
>
> I was quite confused and had a lot to ponder. I went to the
> conference to learn something new and ... well, I learned something
> new. But it was definitely not what I expected to learn. I learned
> that the people in the sessions I attended did not seem to have any
> knowledge about the discussions that we had before in our industry
> about the very topics.
>
> Continuous collective amnesia
> =============================
> What happened? It kept me a while thinking. Eventually, I realized
> that I had observed a disease of our whole industry in its purest
> form: We continuously forget what we have learned. We always reinvent
> everything from scratch. My personal observation is that discussions
> in the IT community start over about every 5 years [1]. That is how
> long we remember as a community. After that we need to rediscover
> your insights from scratch.
>
> Or how I like to phrase it in a bit provocative way:
>
>> In IT, we suffer from continuous collective amnesia and we are even
>> proud of it! [2]
>
> Again, this is not about the people who discussed in that room. All
> of them did their best, they eagerly discussed hoping to gather new
> insights. They were simply victims of a widespread disease in IT:
>
>> We do not value the wisdom of the past.
>
> We suffer from extreme youth obsession, not only regarding the age of
> people but also regarding how we value knowledge. Old knowledge is
> considered "worthless", while new knowledge is considered "great".
>
> A tweet that Mark, founder of Bitmen Studios sent me in a little
> conversion we had via Twitter IMO really nicely describes the
> effect:
>
>> My point here is rather not searching for a unique "best" solution
>> but everywhere software devs across the globe are solving the
>> "same" problem again and again (and fall into the same pitfalls).
>> The increase in tech needed and the associated complexity amplifies
>> that problem.
>
> We reinvent the wheel over and over again, making the same mistakes
> again and again, not learning as a community. And as Mark correctly
> pointed out, the growing technology complexity amplifies the
> problem--and, as I would like to add, vice versa: Our continuous
> collective amnesia amplifies our growing complexity problem.
>
> Why is it this way? Why do we loose our collective memory every
> 5 years?
>
> I am not sure about the causes. My current attempt of an explanation
> consists of 5 factors:
>
> 1. We consider ourselves a dynamic, fast moving industry. New
> concepts, tools and technologies emerge every day. How can
> knowledge of yesterday still be applicable to problems of today?
> That is what we keep telling ourselves. We wallow in our perceived
> vigor and speed of innovation, neglecting that we keep solving the
> same problems over and over again, just with different tools and
> technologies. Yes, some things change, but usually 80%+ of the
> problems stay the same. But we refuse to see that. We prefer
> considering ourselves the "masters of new".
>
> 2. We are technology believers. We are convinced that we can solve
> any problem by simply applying the right tool or technology. E.g.,
> if people have a collaboration problem, the typical reflex is to
> look for a tool that solves the problem, neglecting that it almost
> certainly is not a tool problem. The same is true for all other
> kinds of problems. Whenever we face a non-trivial problem, we try
> to solve it by applying a tool or technology to it instead of
> solving the actual problem. This has become such a natural pattern
> that we do not realize it anymore. And as past tools and
> technologies did not solve the problem, we look for new ones.
>
> 3. Insights grow slower than knowledge. Our knowledge continuously
> grows, the longer we work in IT. Of course, not everything we
> learn is valuable. Quite often we learn that some of our knowledge
> is plain crap. If I, e.g., think back to SOA: Wow, what a crap!
> Would never do it again this way! But not everything was bad. I
> also took some great insights from the SOA times. It takes times
> to separate the wheat from the chaff. In the beginning of our
> careers we basically learn new stuff all the time. It takes some
> years until we start to see the recurring patterns, to separate
> real insights from plain knowledge.
>
> 4. We face a continuous stream of new developers. I feel as if I face
> a new generation of developers every 5 years [3]. Maybe that is a
> very subjective experience. But for me, people just coming from
> their IT education, being 5 years in business, 10 years or 15
> years and more feel very different, like different generations.
> All those new people in IT have to build their own insights from
> scratch. They have nothing to build on as in IT we created a
> cult(ure) of new, celebrating the new and despising the old.
>
> 5. If you combine the "cult of new" with what I call "the arrogance
> of the youth", you get an explosive mixture. Before you think that
> I want to talk bad about younger people: I just talk from personal
> experience. I was a graduate myself years ago and believe me: I
> was arrogant! I knew better! I had to learn humbleness the hard
> way, and I am still not sure if I arrived (it is a lot easier to
> judge an old self than to judge the current self). So, I do not
> want to reproach any young person for being somewhat arrogant. I
> guess that is natural and also healthy to a certain degree because
> it helps against persisting in outdated ideas as an industry. But
> in a culture of new, this habit works as an unhealthy accelerant.
>
> If we put these factors together, we end up with an environment where
> we only value new things and despise old things. If we face a
> problem, we never look if someone solved the same problem before [4].
> We only look for a shiny new solution, ideally a new tool or
> technology. If we learn a good solution for a problem, we forget it
> after a few years and start again from scratch.
>
> It is not that individuals do not learn and do not grow insights.
> They do.
>
> But as a community, we do not.
>
> Unlike other engineering disciplines, we do not create our body of
> knowledge, foster our timeless insights, work to extract the essence
> from the solutions we found yesterday and make it available to the
> community of today. We do not only not create a body of knowledge, we
> despise it. We always look to the horizon hoping to spot a silver
> bullet (which does not exist as we know) instead of looking back once
> in a while and trying to learn from the wisdom of our ancestors.
>
> Moving on
> =========
> This is what I observe all the time. Again, this does not mean that I
> do not meet individuals who act differently. But in general, I see
> the same discussions recurring again and again about every 5 years.
>
> To be honest, I do not have an actual idea how to change this. This
> cult of new is so deeply embedded in our culture and self-perception
> that it would take a long time and effort to change it.
>
> Personally, I try to share some of the old wisdom, e.g., with my talk
> "Excavating the knowledge of the ancestors". There is also the
> "Papers We Love" movement that tries to share such knowledge.
>
> But overall this is just a drop in the ocean. It would require a
> radical rethinking to stop our continuous collective amnesia. We
> would need to accept that most of our problems are not new, but that
> most of the times we solve the same problems again and again, just
> with different technology.
>
> But until we learn this, I am afraid we are not yet an engineering
> discipline, but rather a bunch of people obsessed with "new", not
> learning.
>
> As so often, there would be a lot more to write. But I leave it here.
> I hope I gave you something to ponder.
>
> And maybe you will come up with a great idea how to change it. If you
> have one, please share it! We need it--more desperately than most
> people are aware of ...
>
> [1]
> Maybe it is 7 years, maybe just 4 years, depending on the topic. But
> if you are long enough in this industry, you start to get these
> deja-vu feelings more and more often.
>
> [2]
> I explain the "we are even proud of it" part a bit further down the
> post. Basically it means that we celebrate ourselves for being so
> "innovative" and "fast moving", using it as a welcome excuse to
> ignore everything we could learn from the past.
>
> [3]
> I have seen charts that claim the number of software engineers
> doubles every 5 years. As I do not know the source of these charts, I
> cannot tell if they are right or wrong. Yet, any level of growth
> would leave us with more inexperienced engineers than experienced
> engineers at any point in time which would amplify the "lack of
> actual insights" effect.
>
> [4]
> I do not talk about coding tips shared on platforms like Stack
> Overflow. I talk about more fundamental problems like, e.g., the
> aforementioned reusability, its benefits and risks, when to use it,
> when to avoid it, what you need to consider, etc. I talk about the
> insights that outlast technology waves.
>
> From: <https://www.ufried.com/blog/continuous_amnesia_issue/>
>

On Tue, 16 Apr 2024 10:51:21 +0200
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

> I agree. Many have been the tims when the tiniest company with the tiniest
> application has insisted on moving it over to k8s, when a regular VM with
> a classic LAMP-stack (or equivalent) would have done a better and more
> reliable job, for a vastly lower price.
>
> But oh no, everything has to be k8s these days, even if the service only
> has 10 local users that just use a web frontend to enter data in a
> database.
>
> On Mon, 15 Apr 2024, Ben Collver wrote:
>
> > The Continuous Amnesia Issue
> > ============================
> > by Uwe Friedrichsen
> > October 2, 2020
[Massive Snip]
> >
> > From: <https://www.ufried.com/blog/continuous_amnesia_issue/>
> >

We haven't even learned how top-posting is bad.

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

> 5. If you combine the "cult of new" with what I call "the arrogance
> of the youth", you get an explosive mixture. Before you think that
> I want to talk bad about younger people: I just talk from personal
> experience. I was a graduate myself years ago and believe me: I
> was arrogant! I knew better! I had to learn humbleness the hard
> way, and I am still not sure if I arrived (it is a lot easier to
> judge an old self than to judge the current self). So, I do not
> want to reproach any young person for being somewhat arrogant. I
> guess that is natural and also healthy to a certain degree because
> it helps against persisting in outdated ideas as an industry. But
> in a culture of new, this habit works as an unhealthy accelerant.

We actually live in gerontocratic societies and the power of young people
is just an illusion. Age of US congressists[*] is a good evidence of that.
Young people are just being used by soft power to agressively market
new technologies. What it is truth however, is that they enjoy playing
their part at the stage, and they are even convinced of it themselves.
Lennart is a paradigmatic example.

[*] https://blog.datawrapper.de/age-of-us-senators-charts/

Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote or quoted:
>Obviously, nobody in the room ever had heard anything about what we
>as an industry already had figured out about reusability.

The whole spiel about "the industry" here is just Uwe's two
cents on a specific conference where they didn't vet the
attendees' qualifications beforehand - you know, like they
do with some PhD seminars.

Over at CppCon, they've got these "Back to the Basics" talks where
it's crystal clear they're catering to the newbies without a clue.

Conferences can really run the gamut in terms of quality - a lot
of the time, they're just a cash grab, and they don't want to
scare off the paying punters with any educational prerequisites.

Personally, I wouldn't be caught dead thinking "Alright, time
to pony up and hit up a conference to learn a thing or two."
Nah, I'd know from the get-go that whatever I pick up there
ain't gonna offset the opportunity cost of showing up.

Sounds like Uwe had a different take on it . . .

On Mon, 15 Apr 2024 22:34:53 -0000 (UTC), Ben Collver wrote:

> The discussion moved at a level as if nobody ever had said or written a
> single word about reusability in the past 50 years.

That’s because most of that 50 years was spent talking about it, not
actually doing it.

I think the problem is pretty much solved now. Open Source has become the
established way to develop most parts of the software stack (except
perhaps the most specialized bits at the top). And code reuse follows very
naturally from the ability to share, modify and redistribute other
people’s code.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
> Ben Collver wrote:
>> The discussion moved at a level as if nobody ever had said or written a
>> single word about reusability in the past 50 years.
>
> That’s because most of that 50 years was spent talking about it, not
> actually doing it.

The quoted blog is very vague about what the author thinks is being
ignored/forgotten.

He refers to a NATO conference, and the reports are online:
- http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PDF
- http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1969.PDF

A cursory search finds only a couple of remarks about re-use.

- First an observation (nato1969.PDF p19) that re-using code in
different environments would benefit from automation to adapt to new
environments, which is very much not forgotten, I can think of
multiple examples that fit: (i) compiler platform definitions, (ii)
configure scripts (iii) hardware probing/enumeration by OS kernels.

- Second (p29) an observation that modules must be “isolated in an
envelope” and encourage economical reuse of existing
constructs. Again, examples are easy to see: (i) shared libraries (ii)
class and modules in a wide a range of languages (iii) anything with a
network-addressable API.

> I think the problem is pretty much solved now. Open Source has become
> the established way to develop most parts of the software stack
> (except perhaps the most specialized bits at the top). And code reuse
> follows very naturally from the ability to share, modify and
> redistribute other people’s code.

Indeed. And we’re a long way into finding out the downsides too -
vulnerabilities arising from dependencies, supply chain attacks, etc.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote or quoted:
>A cursory search finds only a couple of remarks about re-use.

A modern software dev gotta know the skinny on reusability.
Here's the lowdown:

- Focus on crankin' out top-notch, well-abstracted, and
well-documented reusable software goodies (code, designs,
specs, the whole nine yards)

- Make sure them reusable components are loosely coupled and
can be tweaked to fit different contexts

- Set up them organizational processes and incentives
that'll reward and grease the wheels of reuse

- Invest in some serious testing, version control, and
security checks for them reused components - gotta keep
'em squeaky clean

- Prioritize that modular, clean, and maintainable code
design to set the stage for future reuse

- Leverage them design patterns, architecture principles,
and software frameworks

- Gotta work across teams and projects to develop them
widely-accepted, high-quality reusable resources

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
>- Leverage them design patterns, architecture principles,
> and software frameworks

The "Open-Closed Principle" is really ticklin' my fancy here.

The idea is that software entities should be open for extension,
but closed for modification.

But then you got Uncle Bob comin' in with his two cents,
sayin' that procedural software is a cinch to tack on more
verbs (procedures/functions), but a real headache when it
comes to addin' new data types. Flip that around, and you got
object-oriented software - a piece of cake for the data types,
but a real bear when you wanna slap on some new verbs (method
names).

Now, I know what you're all thinkin' - "Stefan, you're really
speakin' my language here, but what the heck do you mean by
'open for extension, but closed for modification'?"

Well, let me break it down for ya: Imagine you got this ol' software
program, right? And you wanna add some new bells and whistles to
it, but you don't wanna go messin' with the core guts of the thing.

That's where the "open for extension" part comes in - you wanna make
it easy to tack on new features without havin' to rip the whole darn
thing apart.

But then you got the "closed for modification" bit - you don't want
just any ol' Tom, Dick, or Harry comin' in and start tweakin' the
fundamental workings of your software. That's a one-way ticket to
Bugsville, my friends.

So, in a nutshell, you wanna make your software flexible enough
to grow and evolve, but sturdy enough to keep the foundation
intact. Kinda like building a house - you want the walls to
be strong and sturdy, but the decor and layout should be easy to
change up as your needs evolve.

Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote or quoted:
>He refers to a NATO conference, and the reports are online:

Back in '68 and '69, these were the days when the "software crisis"
was the talk of the town - you know, the whole deal about how dang
hard it was to write code that actually worked and made sense.

Now, these early NATO shindigs really put the spotlight on
the potential upsides of reusing software. We're talking
about boosting quality and productivity, y'all.

The logic was simple - if you use parts that have already been
tested, you're less likely to end up with a steaming pile of
bugs. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

But hold your horses, because there were some downsides to this
whole software reuse thing. Turns out you gotta be real careful when
picking out those pre-made parts, and you might need to shell out
some cash for training and whatnot to get 'em integrated just right.

So in a nutshell, the early NATO software shindigs recognized
the potential perks of reusing software, but they also knew
there were some hurdles to overcome. These conferences helped
cement software reuse as a key concept in the world of software
engineering, warts and all.

On 2024-04-17, Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> The quoted blog is very vague about what the author thinks is being
> ignored/forgotten.

I don't know what specifically the author is referring to, but i have
heard retired professionals talk about technical advertising and
announcements of innovations, and having responses like "That's not
new! We were doing that decades ago using _____!" I've heard it so
frequently that it lends credibility, in my mind, to this article.

I've also heard of marketing churn where vendors are continually
bundling and unbundling their product lines, and the market has
enthusiasm for this shell game, as though it had never been seen
before.

Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> writes:
> On 2024-04-17, Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> The quoted blog is very vague about what the author thinks is being
>> ignored/forgotten.
>
> I don't know what specifically the author is referring to, but i have
> heard retired professionals talk about technical advertising and
> announcements of innovations, and having responses like "That's not
> new! We were doing that decades ago using _____!" I've heard it so
> frequently that it lends credibility, in my mind, to this article.

Selling the old as new is, well, an old tactic; I don’t think there’s
many conclusions to be drawn from it about the underlying balance
between learning and reinvention.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

On 17 Apr 2024 14:37:15 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:

> The idea is that software entities should be open for extension, but
> closed for modification.

They didn’t have good version control in those days, did they?

On Tue, 16 Apr 2024 22:25:48 +0000, Javier wrote:

> We actually live in gerontocratic societies and the power of young
> people is just an illusion. Age of US congressists[*] is a good
> evidence of that.

That’s a US-centric thing, symptomatic of your dysfunctional democracy.
Most of the world is not like that.

On Tue, 16 Apr 2024 21:34:09 +0100, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

> We haven't even learned how top-posting is bad.

I like to repurpose lawyer jokes to make the point. E.g.

A: A Rolls seats six.
Q: What’s the saddest thing about seeing a Rolls with five top posters go
off a cliff?

On Thu, 18 Apr 2024, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Apr 2024 22:25:48 +0000, Javier wrote:
>
>> We actually live in gerontocratic societies and the power of young
>> people is just an illusion. Age of US congressists[*] is a good
>> evidence of that.
>
> That’s a US-centric thing, symptomatic of your dysfunctional democracy.
> Most of the world is not like that.
>

Do note that in europe the fashion du jour is to appoint children to
senior political office, so not any better than the us. Just extremism in
the other direction.

Brilliant!

On Thu, 18 Apr 2024, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> On Tue, 16 Apr 2024 21:34:09 +0100, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:
>
>> We haven't even learned how top-posting is bad.
>
> I like to repurpose lawyer jokes to make the point. E.g.
>
> A: A Rolls seats six.
> Q: What’s the saddest thing about seeing a Rolls with five top posters go
> off a cliff?
>

On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 11:03:26 +0200, D wrote:

> Do note that in europe the fashion du jour is to appoint children to
> senior political office ...

They tend to score higher on measures of democracy than the US does,
though.

On Thu, 18 Apr 2024, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 11:03:26 +0200, D wrote:
>
>> Do note that in europe the fashion du jour is to appoint children to
>> senior political office ...
>
> They tend to score higher on measures of democracy than the US does,
> though.
>

And lower on freedom.

On Fri, 19 Apr 2024 10:42:23 +0200, D wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Apr 2024, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 11:03:26 +0200, D wrote:
>>
>>> Do note that in europe the fashion du jour is to appoint children to
>>> senior political office ...
>>
>> They tend to score higher on measures of democracy than the US does,
>> though.
>>
> And lower on freedom.

Some countries which score higher on press freedom than the USA: Taiwan,
Tonga, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, Namibia, Timor-Leste.

In article <uvs665$2g9b9$7@dont-email.me>,
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 11:03:26 +0200, D wrote:
>
>> Do note that in europe the fashion du jour is to appoint children to
>> senior political office ...
>
>They tend to score higher on measures of democracy than the US does,
>though.

Thing is, we're not actually a democracy...or, at least, we're not supposed
to be. The founding fathers were rightly terrified at the prospect of
democracy, and set up a a republican form of government instead.

You could argue that we have devolved over the past 237 years into something
bearing a greater resemblance to democracy than to the republic that we were
promised. I would be inclined to agree with such an assessment.

--
_/_
/ v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( https://alfter.us/ Top-posting!
\_^_/ >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

On Fri, 19 Apr 2024, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Apr 2024 10:42:23 +0200, D wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 18 Apr 2024, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 11:03:26 +0200, D wrote:
>>>
>>>> Do note that in europe the fashion du jour is to appoint children to
>>>> senior political office ...
>>>
>>> They tend to score higher on measures of democracy than the US does,
>>> though.
>>>
>> And lower on freedom.
>
> Some countries which score higher on press freedom than the USA: Taiwan,
> Tonga, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, Namibia, Timor-Leste.
>

Who cares about press freedom? I say, bring on the fiscal freedom baby!
Everything else is just a fig leaf for slavery.

On Fri, 19 Apr 2024 17:21:08 GMT, Scott Alfter wrote:

> In article <uvs665$2g9b9$7@dont-email.me>,
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 11:03:26 +0200, D wrote:
>>
>>> Do note that in europe the fashion du jour is to appoint children to
>>> senior political office ...
>>
>>They tend to score higher on measures of democracy than the US does,
>>though.
>
> Thing is, we're not actually a democracy...or, at least, we're not
> supposed to be.

So much for being the “leader of the Free World”, eh ...

Scott Alfter wrote:
> In article <uvs665$2g9b9$7@dont-email.me>,
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>> On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 11:03:26 +0200, D wrote:
>>
>>> Do note that in europe the fashion du jour is to appoint children to
>>> senior political office ...
>>
>> They tend to score higher on measures of democracy than the US does,
>> though.
>
> Thing is, we're not actually a democracy...or, at least, we're not supposed
> to be. The founding fathers were rightly terrified at the prospect of
> democracy, and set up a a republican form of government instead.

Representative Democracy, rather then the direct democracy the founders
considered as democracy, though I believe some States have some direct
democracy, which sometimes works, often doesn't, when it comes to
beneficial outcomes.
Of course we have many examples of republican forms of government, China
for example.

>
> You could argue that we have devolved over the past 237 years into something
> bearing a greater resemblance to democracy than to the republic that we were
> promised. I would be inclined to agree with such an assessment.
>

Didn't your declaration of independence start out with all men are
equal? It is where America has been moving, even women are considered
people now a days.
Dave

with <slrnv1rafb.3l3.bencollver@svadhyaya.localdomain> Ben Collver wrote:

*SKIP* [ 2 lines 1 level deep]
> by Uwe Friedrichsen October 2, 2020

Sure thing, topic should be discussed with whoever started it. Not
going to happen, I guess.

*SKIP* [ 72 lines 1 level deep]

> What happened? It kept me a while thinking. Eventually, I realized
> that I had observed a disease of our whole industry in its purest
> form: We continuously forget what we have learned. We always reinvent
> everything from scratch. My personal observation is that discussions
> in the IT community start over about every 5 years [1]. That is how
> long we remember as a community. After that we need to rediscover your
> insights from scratch.

One thing must be made prominent: People who fancy cons is not
representative sample of The Cheap Laborforce of The Industry. With
this notion I conclude that people who fall in this slot tend to burn
out in five years (for whatever reasons). But that's OK, they are
promptly replaced with new ones.

*CUT* [164 lines 2 levels deep]

--
Torvalds' goal for Linux is very simple: World Domination
Stallman's goal for GNU is even simpler: Freedom