author: @sleepyfox
title: Everything old is new again
date: 9-Apr-2024
'Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose' - (French) The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Every so often, I will hear people, usually younger people, say:
When I hear old people say that this new thing is just the old thing that they knew before, they put down all the innovation, all the advances of science, of progress, that we have worked so hard on.
This is the polite version. There's often a side-order of words like 'patronising', 'gate-keeping', and other less savoury epithets.
I can sympathise with these newcomers, because I, like them, was once new to the field. I could see the boundless realms of possibility, and the exciting opportunities for novel work in the field. I can remember being excited by every new thing, every thing that I learned about the existence of, that previously had been unknown to me. The world was my starfish.
The thing is: those people cannot sympathise with me, because they aren't old enough to have experienced the things that I have. I get no understanding, no empathy from them, no shared common experience. I'm a killjoy, a stick-in-the-mud, a Luddite, a laggard, a neophobe.
For those readers who may have less than twenty years in the profession, let me clue you in on a little secret: almost everything 'new' actually isn't. Someone studied it, wrote about it, published in journals, twenty, forty, even sixty or more years ago. Often it is multiple people. Sometimes I see young-timers say 'look at this new thing!' and I feel sadness, because not only is it not new, but there spawned an entire field to study the thing and its related phenomena before they were born.
Studying as a graduate is very different from studying as an undergraduate - at undergraduate level you are spoon-fed what to learn, based upon a well-understood and well-travelled set of core courses, designed to give you a strong foundation to explore the subject. At postgraduate level you're not planning a route based upon a road map, you're setting forth into uncharted territory, before you start you need to know where the field is at, where the limit of knowledge is, where people have already got to. This is why your advisor will almost certainly start your work with a literature review, it is essential to understand what has gone before.
When you've spent a decade, or two, or three, in the industry, you see that people are constantly reinventing the wheel. Except that unaware of all the improvements that have been made to the wheel over the last thousand years, they've reinvented it from scratch, and have hewn an octagonal lump of wood. Meanwhile you show them an alloy rim shod with a tubeless pneumatic tyre and they're all like "Why are you showing me this thing invented nearly a hundred years ago?! My new invention is much simpler, and more sustainable! How are my users supposed to fabricate a five bolt hub anyway? You oldsters just hate change!"
Mostly the existing things exist for a reason, they fulfil the needs of real users, they do it well, and they are reliable after many years of polishing and bug-fixing. Meanwhile the new 'RoundWood' has terrible ride quality, and needs replacing after every hundred miles, and occasionally falls off the axle. This is okay, as most startup carts never even travel a hundred miles because their owners run out of funds before then. "Oh, replacing our RoundWoods? That's a problem we'd love to have."
Postscript: I haven't named names, partially because I don't want this to devolve into a "Actually thing X does contain some novel features" style argument (even if it doesn't), but mostly because there are so many examples that they would outweigh the prose by several orders of magnitude.