An equally important part is the ordering and the reasons something happened.
You can know how to write simple programs in all paradigms, but fail to understand what to use when. You might have memorized a long list of algorithms but not understand the trade-offs involved in choosing one.
Of course history is not the only way to understand this, but it is definitely one good method.
They are related and good to know... but I don't need to know history to flip burgers, run a business or plan my next sprint.
I'm not arguing history is unimportant or good to know or even possibly useful just to have ideas of what to do - or what not to do... I'm just arguing it's importance is over-emphasized.
Why would you want to handicap yourself or your field by making it harder to “talk” to those a little bit further before you?
Your building is resting on their foundations whether you acknowledge it or not. They may have had a solution for the problem you’re facing.
As Knuth was trying to point out, history should be more than tables and time lines.
It should provide details of how important advances where made and how solutions to big problems where found.
And the reason being, since those historical details aren't being recorded, it's more than likely you are in fact solving business problems today using the same techniques discovered in the past, you just don't know it.
If you don't like the term, use another one. But without history you're bound to cargo cult computer science where what you have to do next is plan your sprint. Why do you need a sprint anyway? You might never know if you need a sprint any more if you don't know what problem was it supposed to fix.
It totally looks like you don't. Are you sure about this sentence? Every other sentence seems to contradict this one.
I probably don't do as much as I could/should... but I am a successful programmer who has never needed "history" to understand basic programming principles.
I seem to consider history and good engineering to be different topics while everyone else seems to think you can't understand Big O, YAGNI, SOLID, the difference between Functional Programming and Procedural programing, etc, etc, etc without understanding the history of how assembly turned into c...
Because History is interesting... but not needed to be a good engineer and a good programmer.