[pvg]

I've always felt we don't appreciate history very much in our industry.

Why do you feel this way? ACM has had a History of Programming Languages conference since the late 70s where the well known History of Lisp paper was presented. All sorts of popular accounts are, well, popular. Soul of A New Machine was published in '81, Hackers in '84, Accidental Empires in '92, just as a few examples off the top of my head.

[Natales]

I love the ACM and everyone trying to make the effort to preserve our history.

I see it from the perspective of someone working at a fast-moving, Silicon Valley-based software vendor. In that context, I don't see a lot of appreciation for history, in the day-to-day basis.

But it's not because people intrinsically don't care about it. It's more about our daily lives. We not only have to do what we all have to do, but we also have to keep up with the latest if we want to survive here. That line of thinking constantly pushes us forward, and doesn't reward looking at the past.

[pvg]

I suspect you might be extrapolating too far from the fact that you and your colleagues are, perhaps, exceptionally busy people.

If anything, the great speed of the industry's development has made it particularly concerned with its own history - things become history quickly, the principals are typically still around, etc. The ACM HOPL conference I mentioned started when high level languages had a total history of barely over 20 years. When McCarthy (who was surely also a very busy person) wrote his History of Lisp paper, Lisp was younger than Java is today. And as I said in a sibling comment, the interest extends far beyond industry participants - there are many popular accounts aimed at general audiences and many new ones are written at a seemingly increasing rate. There's a Computer History Museum which prides itself on its working exhibits right here in Silicon Valley. Industry history-related articles are hugely popular on HN - there's a couple of them on the front page right now.

[pjmlp]

And best of all, reselling old stuff as having discovered the powder just now.

[ethbro]

Believe Natales is speaking more to average everydev's state, than the existence of documented history.

If history exists, but nobody reads it, then are we not still lost?

[pvg]

I mentioned a bunch of popular books, not academic works. One of them had a multi-episode PBS TV show over 20 years ago! Since then, popular accounts of various famous and obscure aspects of industry history, biographies key people, etc have become even more common - I just picked some somewhat older ones.

[ethbro]

Popular with the folks around the office?

I don't work in SV, but I like to think I work in a fairly high-skill coding environment. And I regularly have to elaborate on historical references or suggestions.

[pvg]

I'm at a bit of a loss at what to tell you. I feel like we have just about overwhelming evidence that the claim the computer industry is uninterested in its own history is inaccurate. Beyond the tiny smattering of it I've mentioned, that evidence pokes us in the eye every day from the front page of HN. The person who brought this up is apparently too busy to evaluate any evidence and you are telling me the good people at your office know less about computer industry history than you do - a thing that might be as true and as nondispositive about anything ranging from Pokémon to Ming Dynasty Porcelain.

[ethbro]

We're discussing apples and oranges.

You're saying computer science history objectively exists.

I'm lamenting a lack of knowledge of it.

[pvg]

No, I'm saying the supporting evidence for such lamentations is much weaker than the evidence for the opposite view.

[Jach]

Your Pokemon remark seems in the right direction, I think disagreements here are perpetually going to revolve around what one's individual experiences have been and what other experiences one reads or hears most about and how much one lets all that impact what one believes about the "average everydev". At least until the CS departments worldwide take a break from the applied math, walk over to the social science departments, and ask how to start conducting scientific studies about subjective things so that we can collect some stronger evidence one way or another.

In the meantime, how is the (Bayesian) evidence from one's experience to be properly measured next to the existence of books, papers, journals, conferences, videos, some with easily accessible and fairly accurate sales or views numbers to prove a level of popularity? In my office I doubt more than 20 people, perhaps no more than 10, out of the thousand or so spread across the floors (which includes many non-devs) could name over 200 Pokemon. This doesn't negate the existence of millions of people who can do that and more elsewhere, and the millions of dollars in that market. But I think it is at least suggestive about the type of people my company, and companies like mine, tend to hire. Is it really a stretch to extrapolate and make a bet that "perhaps only 2% of salaried devs can name over 200 Pokemon"? How about something just as trivial, the names of all 50 united states?

Pokemon is Pokemon, it doesn't matter much for our field, but where the widespread self-hating of one's profession comes in is that depending on one's experience the bets might not seem to be that different for things more programmers (or other roles like managers) probably ought to know about, their field's own short history just one of them. I recently quipped to someone that I doubt more than 5% of developers are even familiar with the SOLID principles thus it's not very fruitful to ask about them in an interview unless knowing about them is a hard requirement. Even fewer have a good grasp of what each principle means, and even fewer know the trivia that the L is named after a woman (with even fewer still knowing the less trivial nature of what else she contributed to our industry). Maybe I'm over-extrapolating, or a bit pessimistic, maybe I'm letting my enterprise day-job and my conversations with others at places (both enterprise and not) jade me in my expectations for what I think the "average everydev" is like.

My underlying theory is that power laws are everywhere, which means if the distributions on facets like "knows Pokemon", "knows about SOLID", "frequents Hacker News", "knows important bits of computing's history", "writes/buys/reads technical books", et al. both trivial and non-trivial are power laws then the average level would be terribly low compared to the narrow peak on one side of the distribution. The mode, which is probably what influences a lot of personal-experience feelings about the average, is lower still. If your experience is mostly around the peak it may seem otherwise.

Who's to say how much it matters anyway, it's often a pointless discussion / complaint to me. Normal laws are also everywhere, and we know that at least IQ is normal. "Smart but ignorant" is acceptable for many things, and besides, ignorance need not be a permanent condition. One doesn't need to know that Lisp machines in 1990 could do full 3D rigging, editing, and effects (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VmJVNYfxDc) in order to be effective for their Java shop employer.

[pvg]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2UqA_vJ7zQ&t=72

[fourthark]

There’s a lot of good computer history books, but a book about the early days of Unix at Bell Labs has been missing.

Glad it has finally arrived!

[cptnapalm]

There was a UNIX oral history project at Princeton: https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/unixhistory