This week I found a video of a 2018 keynote by Joe Armstrong, “The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science”. It’s the same talk that evolved into “Computer Science: a guide for the perplexed”, a rambling discourse on computer science, software engineering, and the IT industry. The genesis of the talk was this Twitter thread soliciting “examples of great CS ideas that have been largely forgotten”, such as Linda tuple spaces.
I was thinking about trying to compile such a list myself, albeit through more pedantic means – by doing content analysis of old journals and conference proceedings. Armstrong’s method is more entertaining and less laborious, although it’s also subject to the vagaries of human memory.
Armstrong’s talk references other talks, papers, and books I found worth watching and reading, like: