I think more rediscoveries may be references than you suspect, but in the cases that are rediscoveries there is a bit of a knowledge and discoverability issue for PL features for people who aren't PL nerds already.
I'd love it if more people had a more solid understanding of the ideaspaces that have been covered in the PL landscape, but considering that most common paths to working in software (and even to creating and contributing to langs) don't involve needing to know PL history I'm not sure how to get there from here.
If you have resources you think people should be utilizing here, please speak up.
Having a solid Informatics Engineering degree, with focus on systems programming, graphics and compilers, and a very nice university library.
That was it, we had to hunt for books, compuserve, gopher and BBS were still a thing.
Nowadays learning about the history of PL is a google/bing/... search away, a couple of seconds with access to plenty of scanned papers and conference proceddings since the early 60's, so one has to be quite lazy not to research them.
I'd love it if more people had a more solid understanding of the ideaspaces that have been covered in the PL landscape, but considering that most common paths to working in software (and even to creating and contributing to langs) don't involve needing to know PL history I'm not sure how to get there from here.
If you have resources you think people should be utilizing here, please speak up.