> Every generation has to invent sex and politics for itself, or at least imagine for a while in its 20s and 30s that it did. Why not the same in another preparadigmatic field like computing?
Because it's not "preparadigmatic"? There was a perfectly good paradigm before it was tossed out and re-written in Javascript (and then again in some other language, apparently). There have certainly been some revolutionary paradigms in my career (e.g. the web itself), but this "reinvention" of basic front-end tech doesn't qualify.
This stuff holds back the industry. It's part of why software engineers over the age of 30 are considered "old".
Yes, and it is also what doesn't really appear to happen in mature engineering fields, isn't it? No one is reinventing, I don't know, bolts. Or ohms, or amperes, or how one determines a Young's modulus. In those fields you see incremental refinements; mostly, when you see claims of major revolutions, like the recent flap over supposed high-temperature superconductivity in the "LK-99" material, mostly those receive deep suspicion that typically turns out to be justified, because these are fields where exist sizable, coherent bodies of well-tested and reliably predictive theory whose consequences can for most purposes be taken as known. If there is any similar body of knowledge in this engineering discipline then the discipline still qualifies as preparadigmatic for having developed a paradigm its exponents failed to become competent to transmit. But I think there simply exists next to none of such knowledge.
(Even the damned alchemists have their ball-and-stick models! And sure, we have S-expressions, had them for something like seventy years, and do we use them? Do we, hell...)
It's how you get people thinking that the web was revolutionary, and not a product of decades and generations of work toward the concept of a global communications network. But the idea that this inchoate condition holds back the industry doesn't seem to me to hold much water. The first boilers blew up a lot too, before the underlying principles were understood, and mere prolonged survival quickly came to be seen as no mean qualification in a steam engineer. How much did that "hold back" the building of railroads, from where the trains were to where the money was? That, if you care to know, is the overarching metaphor with which I like to describe this industry - though I concede the machines we build are not nearly so hazardous to we ourselves.
If I had to boil down my entire analysis of this industry to something expressible in a single adjective, the only word to fit would certainly be "irresponsible." But I'll also mention at this time that I topped out at a high-school diploma on a sub-3.0 GPA, so if as the holder of a doctorate you find you begin to become bored or uncomfortable talking with me, experience strongly suggests the option of impugning any or all of my intellect, discipline, character, and decency of motivation in speaking is always available as a resort.
Yeah, but it's also important to me I don't get mistaken for wanting to stand next to a guy who's comfortable displaying that kind of attitude. I think my original approach inadvertently encouraged that, so I'm overcompensating now.
And given a somewhat thoroughly developed analysis of this extremely young industry's place in the span of human history to date, why not talk about that when I can spare the time? I feel like I'm probably not the only person here who finds such ideas of interest.
> Every generation has to invent sex and politics for itself, or at least imagine for a while in its 20s and 30s that it did. Why not the same in another preparadigmatic field like computing?
Because it's not "preparadigmatic"? There was a perfectly good paradigm before it was tossed out and re-written in Javascript (and then again in some other language, apparently). There have certainly been some revolutionary paradigms in my career (e.g. the web itself), but this "reinvention" of basic front-end tech doesn't qualify.
This stuff holds back the industry. It's part of why software engineers over the age of 30 are considered "old".