[u-u] I'm in search of war-stories!

[David Collier-Brown]

I'm now the de-facto anthology/collection editor of /The "Not Invented 
Here" Chronicles,/ in ACM Queue.

It’s about all the times when something brilliant fell out of use 
because someone (or their employer) was unwilling to look and see if it 
was already done. It “wasn’t invented here.”

So I’m looking for stories about stuff where a technique was rejected, 
or just fell out of use due to carelessness.

The stupidest case I know of is extended versioning for controlled 
change. It was invented in Multics(!), reinvented in Solaris, and 
re-re-invented in glibc. It’s described in Paul Stachour’s CACM 
article[1], as a superset of the kind of ordinary versioning /everyone/ 
does.

I start the series with “The Hardest Way is the Easiest”[2], a story 
about getting full-path test coverage without infinite labor.

So what have you run into that didn’t get enough respect, and could be 
usefully reincarnated?

As with Paul, I’ll play editor or co-author, if you’re shy at submitting 
articles to the ACM. Heck, brain-dump on me on the phone and I’ll be 
your secretary (:-))

--dave

[1 https://queue.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1626135.1640399 ]

[2 A draft is at codeberg, 
https://codeberg.org/davecb/NIH/src/branch/main/Exhaustion/Exhaustion.pdf ]




-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at spamcop.net           |              -- Mark Twain
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