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Comment by ak39 | Hacker News Reader

"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

Max Planck.

The great Max Planck was indeed right. But there's a flip side to this aphorism that is just as relevant (if not more) to our computer systems society. Our problem is that the new generation seems to want to re-invent what our forebears had taken great pain to describe and find theoretical and practical answers to (relational databases, data formats, UI theory etc). Our problem is that the modern computer system society suffers from a generational memory gap. Amnesia of solved problems.

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One of the things I find interesting is this:

In computer programming, a “solution” to a problem is in essence, a structured framework of thought.

As an example, why are there many different programming languages? Well in addition to various other reasons, for the sake of solving problems in a new or different way of thinking.

Is youth constantly reinventing solutions to already solved problems due to amnesia, or are they perhaps creating new ways to reason about already identified problems?

Just because you saw the problem first doesn’t buy you the right to providing the only solution.

Computer science is unique in that it is art as much as science. Allowing for multiple frameworks of thought on a solution allows for the best solution to rise to the top.

If we are still seeing an influx of new and interesting solutions to existing problems, perhaps our field isn’t as mature as we’d like to think it is.

Is youth constantly reinventing solutions to already solved problems due to amnesia, or are they perhaps creating new ways to reason about already identified problems?

I believe the commonly accepted viewpoint is simply that the established generations have too many accumulated biases or baggage, too much at stake, or dug themselves in too deep of a hole to consider new facts or new approaches to old problems. E.g. the famous quote:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

The commonly accepted viewpoint of the young, maybe.

But after you've seen the same things re-invented several times only for each effort to run into the same brick wall, at some point you want off the merry-go-round.

> Just because you saw the problem first doesn’t buy you the right to providing the only solution.

Of course. But if you're going to provide a new solution to a problem, you'd better be able to compare and contrast your solution to the old one. If you can't do that, there's no reason to take your solution seriously because you haven't done your homework.

For example let's say you come up with an ingenious solution to tracking a moving object in the presence of uncertainty. Here's what you can say and be taken seriously:

"My solution uses an improved version of a Type X Kalman filter that works as follows."

"My solution does not use a Kalman filter because Kalman filters won't work for this problem for the following reasons."

Here's what you should not say if you want to be taken seriously:

"What's a Kalman filter?"

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