On old and new in the Computer Science

I remember several years ago in undergrad listening to my old professor. He would always jabber on about LISP. Back then I remember thinking, gee give it a break man, the language is what? 50 years old? Isn't it time to move on?

These last weeks I have finally been able to play around with a dialect of LISP called PLT Scheme. It got triggered by reading the so called Wizard book: "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"

I must say I am very impressed with Scheme. I am still not sure if I could ever be fully comfortable with the language because of all the annoying parenthesis. But the power and flexibility of the language is mind-boggling. And there is something beautiful about that ultra simple syntax. Everything is just words separated by spaces and enclosed by parenthesis. That is all there is to it!

Compare that to the extremely complicated syntax in C++.

I have realized that thinking that new is always better than old is the dumbest belief I ever had. Sometimes new stuff is old already at the instance it is made, while old stuff is modern 20 years later.

An example of this is the code base of our program at work. A lot of the code is crap and badly thought out. At first I assumed it was the old code that was bad. Then I realized that in fact the old stuff is what was fairly good and the crap was mostly new stuff.

The stuff is a maintenance nightmare because nothing is commented. I talked to a guy who talked about a system he worked on that was from the 50s or 60s or something. The New York subway system I believe. I asked if that wasn't hard to do given that the original makers were probably not around anymore. But it wasn't because as he explained for each source code file there was a corresponding document file explaining that source code file in detail. It was all very well documented.

I wonder how could they get software design right 50 years ago and we manage to screw it up today?

Same with LISP, mainstream languages are only now starting to get some of the more important LISP features. How could they get it right that long time ago, and we mange to screw it up today with languages such as C++ and Java?

I increasingly realize that languages like C++, Java , C# etc seldom offer anything new. They are just the same shit in new wrapping. New wrapping in this case means new syntax.

But perhaps the biggest eye opener with respect to the value of old stuff, is when I read Adam Smiths the Wealth of Nations. It is something like 250 years old. I had read other new books about economic history and theories for this and that about the historical economic development of China, Africa etc. Surprisingly I found Smith treatment of the same much clearer, well reasoned and thought out. In short he offered a much better explanation than these newer books. But this isn't the first time. People like Ricardo and other economist have come after Smith and presumable proved him wrong only to have later economist discover that Smith was right all along.

Perhaps talking of old and new as if it corresponded to bad and good is about as stupid as saying that derivation and integration is bad because now we have newer mathematical methods. A good idea is a good idea no matter how old it gets.