Enough with the movements

There's a huge confusion between the movement as a whole, and the movement at the individual level. What exactly is stupid: the fact that some people sell bullshit seminars about a new fancy programming paradigma or the fact that some people try to improve themselves by looking at the new tools out there?

Movements are just the inevitable by-product of an underlying phenomenon: people are attracted to the next shiny things. Note that I said "people", not just Hackers/Programmers. Actually, a lot of the hype around the new tools does not come just from the Programmers, but is carried by management as buzzwords.

But complaining about "movement" misses the point. Those who currently wrap these concepts around layers of bullshit in order to sell books and certifications are not going to stop doing it anytime soon. Should we stop buying the books? Well that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As the OP said, there often is a kernel of truth in these new methods, and although it is annoying for us to have to skim through all that noise, I don't think that ignoring everything new is the right thing to do.

"...very little of what I've learned that's genuinely important wasn't known about and written about before I was even born."

The problem here is to know what is genuinely important. I guess the only thing that's genuinely important is what makes a turing machine: the rest is just some extra layers. But detail matters a lot. The reason why there are so many different languages / paradigmas is because different tools are more adapted to different problems. I'm not a big fan of OOP, and I never use it ... unless I think that it is absolutely obvious that objects are the right thing to do (which is pretty rare).

Movements are not about the subject matter or the business that develops around it but about people who are interested in the subject matter. Movements are about how those people interacts and go about discovering, leaning, improving and interacting.

As such stating that they are stupid is...errr..stupid and kind of shows that in this case you are doing exactly the same mistake you are (correctly) complaining about: you don't know enough about the body of knowledge called Anthropology that came before you.

also: just because you don't see the movements in sciences like physics doesn't mean they are not there. You are comparing an extremely young thing (software engineering/CS) with sciences that have been going for centuries (and more). You need to study the history of science in order to be able to see the movements over the centuries (and it's plausible that after a few centuries movements become slower/longer)

"Movements" or "schools of thought" are common in one form or another. It happened in psychology with Freudian, Neo-Freudian, Behaviourism, and finally the Cognitive revolution, which transitioned into the modern merging of psychology and neuroscience. It also happened in mathematics with the Liebniz vs. Newtonian schools of calculus, and countless times through the entire history of philosophy.

When future people look back at the state of Physics in the 20th century to the present, I think they'll see it too with the split between relativistic physics and quantum mechanics as an explanation for how the universe works.

I'm sure there are countless other examples. My point is that this isn't unique to computing. It's a common phase for a field to go through -- perhaps every field does at the beginning. Some fields transition out of this state and become stable, with a kernel of very solid principles and new development around the periphery. Others, like philosophy, are stuck in this state seemingly indefinitely. That kernel never develops.

The only question is when will it end in computing? What will that kernel be?