Software people generally know very little about software history, and that's OK with them. It's too bad. There's a lot to learn from software history. It can help you now!
Wonderful World
In 1960, Sam Cooke released a single called "Wonderful World."
Here are some of the lyrics:
I sure hope you can win that girl or boy you're after in spite of all that not-knowing!
The Wonderful World of History
Politicians study history in general and the last election in particular. Fiction writers frequently read fiction, current and historic. Generals study old battles for their lessons; even today at West Point, they read about the Civil War. Learning physics is like going through the history of physics, from Galileo and Newton and through Planck and Einstein to the present. Even the terms used in physics remind you of its history: hertz, joules and Brownian motion. Math is the same way. Whatever you're learning was first established at some point in history, and remains as valid and applicable to the present as when first discovered.
Software, by contrast, is almost completely a-historical. Not only are most people involved uninterested in what happened ten years ago, even the last project is unworthy of consideration – it’s “history.”
History isn't just for historians
How did we learn about biological evolution? By observing species and trying to figure out their history. How did we learn about genes and DNA? By trying to figure out the mechanisms that make organisms work through time. Geology? Gee, I wonder how those mountains got there? And what happened so that I'm finding fossils of creatures that lived in the ocean up there?
A good deal of science is historical in nature. We try to construct theories that explain how things got to be the way they are; and then we run tests or make lots of observations.
Software History is for the Birds
Or so it appears, from the way that the vast majority of software people act. We're about to embark on a new project. How did similar projects work out in the past? What are we doing differently? The uniform response to questions like these? Crickets.
One thing I've realized is that our determined effort to ignore history in software is a completely understandable defense mechanism. Suppose you're starting an hours-long road trip. At the end is near-certain disaster. Would you like to know that at the beginning of the trip, so that every second is miserable, building to a crescendo of terror? Or would you rather blissfully cruise along, and then be blind-sided at the end, leading to a mercifully quick death? Apparently, pretty much everyone agrees that blissful ignorance is the way to go.
A Wonderful World
Here's what I think would be a wonderful world:
- They both love each other, AND
- They know lots of software history together, leading not only to A's in school, but great jobs and successful projects.