[taeric]

This seems to couch the idea that older professions finally "understand it." Look at the houses people made 40 or so years ago. We now have to have disclaimers indicating that the materials they used were... not so wise to be used.

Go back further, suddenly you will be left with basically nothing but survivor bias. It will seem like they had it together, but it is just as likely they did not. Pull it in some and you get the hastily built houses that seemed to fall apart way too easily.

I feel like this can go with software. It is actually trivial to find software that is still is use from the 80s. Older fortran code still exists. It is far harder to find any lessons in those software packages. Even when I desperately want to.

[panic]

Sure, but we've been building houses for a long time. We know a lot more about building houses today (or even 40 years ago) than they did when the practice of house-building was still relatively new. And most of this knowledge didn't come from building houses over and over, but from developing better theories of how buildings stay up, using better materials, etc....

[taeric]

I think we'd both be surprised on how much actually does come from "building houses over and over." My assertion being that much of material science advancement came from required advancements from previous failed houses.

[penpapersw]

That's my same experience with programming. That's kind of what I was getting at in this article actually: that you get better by doing your best and making mistakes. Nothing beats hard-earned experience.

[taeric]

Completely agreed. It is good to learn from the mistakes of others, though.

To that end, it is good to have exposure to a lot of things that have failed. Seeing how they succeeded isn't as instructive, interestingly.