[shalabhc]

> But for the most part, the reason these great past ideas are not in use is because nobody has made them into a compelling product.

I think you're overestimating the market's ability to select good ideas and specifically, promote long term scientific advances. A lot of variables affect what succeeds, e.g. marketing, coincidence, network effects etc.

You cannot leave everything to the market (i.e. what people adopt) and expect great science to come from it. Many times, great science (and maths) comes from the compelling drive of people to discover and create something new. These talks are encouraging that kind of research, and I don't see them saying they 'have it figured out', but rather pointing out ideas they think should be explored more extensively.

[symstym]

I certainly don't think that the market selects good ideas or is sufficient to promote long-term advances. Per the bit of my comment that you quoted, I'm saying that the reason that the ideas are not in use (more) is that they haven't been incorporated into more compelling products. He feels that good ideas are not in wide use because we didn't "get" them or forgot them. I'm saying that sure, that may be part of the reason, but I think most of the reason is that certain ideas that seem good on paper are really hard to put into practice.

Quoting the talk:

> But I do think that it would be kind of a shame if in forty years we’re still coding in procedures and text files in a sequential programing model. I think that would suggest we didn’t learn anything from this really fertile period in computer science. So that would kind of be a tragedy.

Lots of people seem aware of the idea of coding without text files. There are some "visual" programming environments with traction (in the game dev world, Max/MSP). I'm even working on one myself! But there are significant downsides/challenges associated with this approach (more difficult to version control, often tied to one editor, etc.). So to his quote, the fact that we're still coding in text files may not be because we didn't learn anything, but because the idea of non-textual programming is hard to form into a product that more people want to use.

I agree with you that his talk is very valuable in terms of drawing attention to ideas that deserve more exploration, and I love the talk. It's just this one facet that I take issue with, the suggestion that the ideas haven't caught on because nobody appreciates them. His talks are frequently at the top of HN, they are widely appreciated. People have been super excited about related projects, like Light Table and Eve, and yet they haven't gotten much traction. So I think it's worth acknowledging that the problem is less idea-awareness and more compelling-implementation-difficulty.