Me in Words

Think of it as periodic refactoring of world views.

Changes in hardware and the growing complexity of software are forcing us to rethink the foundations of programming. Just like the builders of Europe’s great gothic cathedrals we’ve been honing our craft to the limits of material and structure. There is an unfinished gothic cathedral in Beauvais, France, that stands witness to this deeply human struggle with limitations. It was intended to beat all previous records of height and lightness, but it suffered a series of collapses. Ad hoc measures like iron rods and wooden supports keep it from disintegrating, but obviously a lot of things went wrong. From a modern perspective, it’s a miracle that so many gothic structures had been successfully completed without the help of modern material science, computer modelling, finite element analysis, and general math and physics. I hope future generations will be as admiring of the programming skills we’ve been displaying in building complex operating systems, web servers, and the internet infrastructure. And, frankly, they should, because we’ve done all this based on very flimsy theoretical foundations. We have to fix those foundations if we want to move forward.

https://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/10/28/category-theory-for-programmers-the-preface/

I am not talking about having more gurus like Martin Fowler. When you have a good theory you won’t need a guru.