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This technique goes back to the late 90s where Apple WebObjects (owned by NeXT at the time) pioneered this approach in their web framework.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects

Was quite revolutionary at the time and it also included the first (or one of the very earliest at least) SQL ORMs.

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You’re the first and only person to point out this fact, which shows how depressingly little history is studied by people who work in this field. It’s a shame it’s become about getting to The Money as quickly as possible…

How do we go about passing this kind of historic knowledge between generations of engineers? In my observation, most newcomers to the industry are trained either academically or through self-guided practical learning, i.e. by hacking and reading tutorials. Neither method exposes them to such 'contemporary history' of innovation within the field.

I got a Compsci degree and we did in fact learn some history, figures like Grace Hopper and Alan Turing, how punched card computers worked (we even got to make our own punched cards!) Obviously people who are passionate about computers will find such history very interesting; the newcomers with dollar signs in their eyes won't care, they just want to 'make an app'.

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