Everything old is new again : What we could have learned from a book on COBOL from 1976, but didn’t
Tech culture so often focuses on the future, it is easy to forget technology has a past. Yet, the long term history of software development, and the short term history of specific technologies, can provide a context to help us better understand our present situations, and inform our future choices. Using an 1976 book on writing better COBOL as a guide, this talk explores the ways “new” ideas are old, how “bad” ideas were good (in their context), and how we might use those insights to better navigate a tech zeitgeist that insists on throwing out the old again and again and again.
