[skybrian]

Technology changes and user expectations change, and we need to adapt.

And it's not my area, but this seems to be true in construction as well? The building codes change, and available materials and components change, as do their relative prices. Maybe not as fast, but fast enough to make older books out of date.

[mdorazio]

Have to disagree with most of this. Technology changes and user expectations change, but there’s a missing link here to show that either of these really necessitates Yet Another Language/Framework, launching Yet Another Product/Service, or rebuilding things from the ground up. It’s a bit like a homeowner wanting an updated kitchen and a contractor telling them they need a whole new house for it to work, when really the contractor just prefers building flashy new houses for their portfolio over doing renovations on a budget.

Also, side note: with respect to carpentry, books from 50+ years ago on wood working techniques, framing, joinery, etc. are perfectly relevant today. And many of my grandfather’s tools are still in use in my workshop.

[afarrell]

But "good carpentry" is primarily a judgement made based on of physics, with some haptics and design psychology and (hopefully not) entomology.

Humans are pretty good at physics. At the layer of abstraction where carpenters work, our predictive ability is solid.

What fields of science are the primary judges of "good software"?

> Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute > -- Harold Abelson

So it is pretty much _all_ psychology and cognitive science.

Humans are not yet that good at cognitive science because brains are complicated. There is real disagreement about how Working Memory operates -- and Working Memory is core to why modularity matters!