Recent events made me once again pick up a pattern that I think is very common in programming or tech communities: Some new technology is demonstrated, it gets a lot of attention, and then some people start commenting "I don't get it!? What's new about this? [Older technology] had this [time] ago!" You can find it right here in this forum, on Twitter, and pretty much anywhere. In places like HN it seems an even more typical reaction but it seems an extremely popular reaction in tech circles. Why is that? I find this a genuinely interesting question to ask, because I think it tells us something about our culture and our values. Why put the novelty of a technology above all else? Comments like that appear like something that isn't new doesn't deserve attention. But how can we make progress, if we can't build on something existing? Just thinking a little about this, I come to the conclusion that "new" is actually very difficult to define. And isn't pretty much everything "new" we invent just a (maybe) new combination of existing ideas anyway? (Everything is a remix) I'm not bringing this up to call out the people who do this — heck, from time to time I catch myself thinking like that. And I don't know why. I suspect there's some lizard-brain evolutionary territory thing going on, which I don't think is healthy for us as a community. Shouldn't we celebrate that something old but apparently useful was picked up again, given a new spin, perhaps infused with other ideas, or made available to another community beyond the original one? Isn't that the progress we're looking for?

I had a similar reaction. Something in the last day or two reminded me of Linux people pooh-poohing FaceTime.

I think I’ve said something of this pattern twice in the last few days. Most of the time, when I ask a question like this, I’m trying to properly fit something into a lineage, so as to better understand it. “Knowledge through analogy”, as it were. Personally, it gives me greater confidence when an idea can be traced through history, and the farther back the better (especially if it can sustain jumps in generations and cultures)

Totally agree, and I’m interested for the same reason: it speaks to our values. Two values I think stand out here: 1. Neophilia: Many of us got into tech because we want new. We want interesting. We get a thrill from innovation. It fits our desire for new to assume that “the solution doesn’t exist yet” rather than “the solution is out there, it just hasn’t been put together in the right way” 2. Time-saving: I have ADD, and I’m looking for new interesting things all the time. I’m also discarding things all the time to make room for the new interesting things I want. So I’ll grab almost any excuse to throw away the new thing I just got. If New Thing is “just” Old Thing With New Paint, I can save attention time and throw it away. (Related topic that I find so damn handy here: http://web.archive.org/web/20170213221906/https://wiki.c2.com/?JustIsaDangerousWord and http://alistapart.com/blog/post/the-most-dangerous-word-in-software-development/ )

That A List Apart article is a great link, thank you, @yoz! That then reminded me of the social rules at the Recurse Center: https://www.recurse.com/social-rules It sounds a little patronizing and I was skeptical about these rules when I spent three months there. And in just a few days I saw the impact these small cultural things have. I've never been part of a more inclusive and diverse community in tech than RC.

@Stefan Wow, I’d not seen those before. Fantastic, thank you!

@Daniel Hines you're extending the pattern, though. From "let's not criticize derivative products just for being derivative" to "let's track paths of derivation". One failure mode of knowledge through analogy is that analogies can act like blinkers and keep you from noticing where the differences outweigh the commonalities.

I think the implicit claim in "[older technology] had this [time] ago" is "and since your article didn't cite it as prior art, you haven't done your reasearch, and are building blind to downsides we've known about for [time]". Or at least, the common case is going to be "newer technology otoh has opted not to have it"; I suppose if someone says "oh yeah windows has had this for the past twenty years, click the flemtor menu and select option zorch", that is also an instance of this pattern(and useful in its own right as the referenced implementation will be less bare-bones than a new announcement), but I think I've seen that variant a lot less.

The more you know, the less newness seems a good standard for relevance.

If someone promotes a new programming language which is almost identical to another without mentioning the other, and there’s no clear difference, then it totally makes a lot of sense to point the similarities out: • If you liked it, then that other language would probably interest you even more especially if it is more established • Comparing to things that people know helps their understanding • If the authors falsely claim novelty, then that’s impolite and sometimes people point it out

Best to begin with, "in the following programming stew, the ideas ingredients have long been added for tasty effect."

How about "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it"? When I see some new thing that is basically a rediscovery of some old thing, especially an old thing that failed for good reasons, it makes me wonder "How'd they solve the issues that sunk the previous try at this idea?". If they have some new novel solution, great! If they don't actually have a solution then likely they are going to hit the same wall.

Reminds me of "first" mover advantage, which often refers to the first one to go big.

In spite of the enthusiastic beginning, this thread is suffering from a lack of concrete examples. I can't remember what I was thinking of up top. But here's one example from further back: when Apple launched FaceTime I heard many Linux people claim Linux always had it, what was the big deal. Another one: when Reddit was launched you heard lots of comments about how it was like Digg or Slashdot. In both cases the product succeeded. So whether they thought about history is moot. Maybe they did and just didn't bother to inform all us intellectuals of their reasoning. Or they didn't and got lucky, and ended up timing external trends better. Or they focused on important differences to an extent that things that seem similar to us don't even register as similar. There's a fairly common failure mode of academia where some people will reject papers for not citing all the 'important' work. In practice, 'important' is subjective and often self-serving and subject to confirmation bias. But even setting that aside, too much focus on history can create blind spots. I think learning from history is useful, but too much analysis can also lead to paralysis. What is essential is the actual building. Being unaware of history isn't sufficient grounds for dismissing a project. Usually when I see a new project that I think ignores the lessons of history, I can come up with specific concrete questions about scenarios that rebut it, without needing to cite the past projects that taught me to look for those scenarios. History is useful raw material, but can usually be distilled into something less path-dependent. And where it can't, maybe (heresy) it doesn't matter. Now I'm looking forward to others pointing out examples supporting their points of view. That way we may find that the thing we've been fighting to describe is in fact two or three or five distinct things.

I think we see a lot of "what is new about this" or even "what is the point of this" in programming because every programmer has their favored technologies, and perceives every project being announced or written about as taking from a limited pie of attention or activity, and thus such comments are their way of pushing back against what they perceive as unworthy projects

I think the canonical example of this is the Hacker News thread first demoing/launching Dropbox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem

"trivially" 😂. I guess it turns out that if something's "the same, but easier", then the "but easier" can be fairly important.

Also the sharing of solutions with others. I can get an ad hoc shell script working easily for myself. Getting it working reliably for others with arbitrary setups (all technically subsumed under "Linux 18.04") is where all the problems are. A further level of hell is in sharing solutions with others that have to work with each other. I can mount a curlftpfs (whatever that is) for myself, you can mount a curlftpfs for yourself. But can we get them to talk reliably to each other? Hell no, the level of expertise needed for that is an order of magnitude higher. Gell-Mann amnesia and Dunning-Kruger effect are a potent combination of cognitive biases.

I suspect Apple is a good source of examples here: they have a reputation for waiting to watch what others do with ideas, then refine the product experience around it until they achieve balance across most of those product qualities. Sometimes they get it wildly wrong, but those failures are mostly notable because they’re exceptions. Most obvious example: that Slashdot comment about the iPod. “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” Example from my own experience: MacOS Spaces. Virtual desktops had existed for many years; I had tried several variations across different operating systems, but Spaces is the only one I’ve actually stuck with. Yes, I realise that many folks here never had the problems that I did with earlier examples, but the mainstream success of Spaces is, I think, proof of the key point: Most tech-focused folk think of the core technology idea as the important part, and everything else as polish or marketing. That is why their technologies lose. Product design can turn good engineering into something world-changing.