The GP is talking about (future) researchers in particular. Still, there’s a tremendous historical myopia among practicing software engineers as well, leading us as a field to reinvent old ideas in new clothes every ten years or so.
Yes, sometimes these have to do with changing requirements or hardware capabilities, but more often they're just about a new generation wanting shiny new things rather than boring old things. Except that the shiny new things were the boring old things of the previous iteration.
Many ideas of the yesteryear were not bad or even infeasible, indeed they were successfully put into real-world use. Until the tide changed and they became unfashionable for whatever reason. And then they became fashionable again, but without a view of the history there's little synthesis of ideas, little learning from past experiences beyond the current cycle.
http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland...
Until you do, of course. At which point it's clear you should've known about it years ago.
Not sure where the disconnect is because at no point have I said you shouldn't learn how to do your job correctly - and understanding Big O, SOLID, YANGI, etc are all important to know... but have nothing to do with history.
So again... history isn't needed to be a good engineer. And being a good engineer and KISS programming is possible without understanding 100 years of history.
But programmers don't want to be accountants, they want to use new and shiny things even when it's not the pragmatic choice, even when it would be better engineering to understand things in a broader context, to understand the history behind these "new" (actually old) things.
Same for stuff like construction and cooking... stuff that's been around a very long time has become rather stable and of course it isn't going to be "reinvented every five years".
> when it would be better engineering
again... I don't need to understand history to understand Big O and which algorithm to use in the right circumstances or when procedural programming is proffered to functional.
At no point in my career have I ever NEEDED history to decide which library to use, which sorting algorithm is suitable and how to create functional apis or windows services.
History is nice to know... but still 100% not needed at any stage of the process.
I'm not sure where the disconnect is because I like history... I like learning about American history, world history, programming history... but none of that has ever been relevant in any of my jobs when it comes to day to day decisions and projects.
"don't reinvent the wheel" is a separate topic and while I can agree that many things get reinvented - computers are still a very young industry compared to stuff like accounting and architecture.