The same old song - new names for old things

Question

Reading in this section , I remembered what always bothers me.

There are certain methods, methodologies, etc. that have existed for a long time, were well known and used. And then someone wrote a book, painted a new bizarre name on it, and out of nothing, he begins to seem like something new, revolutionary, the next big thing, etc. Etc....

Design patterns are a mixture of well-known solutions that mature and become "collective wisdom"; they are not universal laws and were not created by GoF. You do not need to read a book to instinctively apply some of them. Templates evolved on their own, GoF just stuck it all together in a book.

As Phil Factor points out , Extreme Programming is nothing new either.

What other things make you think: "I have already seen this before ..."?

Answer 1

Ajax was made by many, long before this name was superimposed on it.

Answer 2

REST is basically what HTML was designed for.

Answer 3

I think the Greenspun Tenth Rule of Programming is an example of what you are asking:

Any fairly complex C or Fortran program contains a special, informally indicated error with a slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

Answer 4

There is a very long list here .

Answer 5

Dependency Injection looks just like what people did in the early days of Java, where everything had an interface, even those things are needed. Turned into a soup interface. Despite the fact that it had the beautiful name shinny on it, then creating the frame again cools.

Answer 6

free new names "directory" (UNIX) / "folder" (Mac / Windows) / etc. (“group” in HDF5 , poorly selected “repository” in SurroundSCM , “project” in Visual SourceSafe , etc. etc. etc.)

The same goes for the newly invented and confusing use of terms such as "project", "session", "workspace", "solution" (Visual Studio) to serialize the GUI state of the integrated development environment.

Answer 7

Refactoring is the new name for what we have always done by rewriting existing code in the best possible way.

I agree with Christer Ericson when he says rewrite, something never meant rewrite from scratch. When I rewrite something, I always do it based on the previous version, if I see no particular reason to throw away every line of code. Therefore, the "refactor" seems completely pointless to me.

Answer 8

I think many people would agree that Ruby is a re-invention of Smalltalk.

Answer 9

Many of the ideas behind distributed version control systems have long existed on the mainframe.