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With the advent of a new technology, some old ideas - despite been good - are forgotten in the process.

I read a lot how some "new" thing was already present in Lisp like 60 years ago, but only recently resurface with other name or on top of another language.

Now look like the new old thing is build functional, non-mutable, non-locking-thread stuff... and that make me wonder what have been "lost" in the art of development of software? What ideas are almost forgotten, waiting for resurface?

One of my, I remember when I code in foxpro. The idea of have a full stack to develop database apps without impedance mismatch is something I truly miss. In the current languages, I never find another environment that match how easy was develop in fox back them.

What else is missing?

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If you've got 10K, you can read this old, deleted post from Stack Overflow. On second thought, never mind; the top-voted answer is "Free thinking." Blecch. – Robert Harvey Jul 1 '12 at 1:22
Visual Studio LightSwitch is the new FoxPro – Pratik Jul 1 '12 at 3:12
There's a lot of things that had been lost for no reason but the stupid market economy. Transputers and Occam (now making a slow but inevitable comeback), VMS and RMS (lost somewhere deep in the NT kernel), hardware garbage collection (lost with the Lisp machines and Ada-centric processors), SCSI bus for the ordinary folk, etc. – SK-logic Jul 1 '12 at 9:08

closed as not constructive by Robert Harvey, pdr, gnat, Thomas Owens♦ Jul 1 '12 at 10:08

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1 Answer

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In the current languages, I never find another environment that match how easy was develop in fox back them.

Because software in general is vastly more complex now. It has nothing to do with that. If you were to try to actually develop a modern application in FoxPro, you wouldn't get very far.

The truth is, there is nothing missed. People build functional now because it has parallelism advantages. But I don't think that when Lisp was created, more than one hardware thread was a challenge for the average programmer. Another is garbage collection. Introduced with Lisp... made viable with generational garbage collection, vastly increased program size/complexity and vastly decreased hardware cost 30-35 years later.

Just because a feature originated a long time ago does not mean that idea was lost, or even smart or the right thing to do in that era or viable without other modern enhancements or requirements, or other features of modern languages.

It's simply not true to assume that those ideas had practical implementation value before, just because they do now, and we should have been doing it that way all along. They didn't and we shouldn't. They have value now because some external factor changed.

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-1. Lisp machines were practical and a way ahead of their contemporaries. The only thing slowed down their adoption was the general stupidity of the programming masses. – SK-logic Jul 1 '12 at 9:10
I understand that is impossible to ask for the truly lost. But some good ideas have been good ideas back them, but don't get the proper diffusion it deserves... – mamcx Jul 1 '12 at 17:31
@mamcx: I doubt you could come up with an example. – DeadMG Jul 2 '12 at 6:36

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