[pcwalton]

Yeah. The weird thing is that in other industries, people have no trouble admitting that the old stuff is often problematic and needs to be replaced. In the supposedly forward-looking tech industry, though, we stick with our tools from 1978 and stubbornly resist admitting that we have learned anything since then. It's strange.

[jacobolus]

I don’t buy that at all. There are huge amounts of path-dependent cruft throughout all human endeavors:

  - A base ten number system
  - Lack of useful structure in the symbols and names for numerals, and lots of weird inconsistencies in number names
  - Inconsistent, confusing, and arbitrary names/notation for basic mathematical operators and functions
  - Use of inferior Gibbs/Heaviside vector algebra instead of Clifford/geometric algebra
  - Very poor notational conventions in many advanced math/physics fields
  - A highly irregular calendar
  - Poorly designed measurement systems
  - English spelling
  - Very distorted dominant world map projections
  - Most nutrition “science”, including federal dietary guidelines
  - Bogus forensic “science” used to imprison innocent people
  - The methodology and writing style used in political science
  - Many essentially debunked economic models which continue to be taught
  - A legal system chock full of incidental complexity and inconsistencies
  - Inadequate species taxonomies
  - Poor color models used in art/design
  - Even worse, specification of colors using proprietary, arbitrary Pantone chips
  - Lots of poor/obsolete metrics used for evaluating lighting
  - Audio mastering with heavy-handed dynamic range compression
  - Lectures as primary pedagogy in high school/college
  - Grammar drills as a method for teaching foreign languages
  - Modern zoning requirements in many countries
  - Many unsafe and inefficient street design requirements
  - The rigid design of modern shoes (let’s not even start on heels)
  - Terrible user interfaces for most household appliances
  - Mediocre user interfaces for many musical instruments
  - An inefficient and dangerous typewriter / computer keyboard (which persists on tiny phone screens!?)
  - Unhealthy design of office furniture, car/airplane seats, child strollers, etc.
  - .....

Some of this stuff is decades old. Some is thousands of years old.

[cwyers]

Things look different from the outside than they do on the inside. The old saw of "science advances one funeral at a time" is true in lots of fields, you just probably see a lot more examples in programming because you spend more of your time there.