
X12 - TheAceOfHearts
https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/
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TheAceOfHearts
Just saw on reddit that X11 turned 30 today! Someone made a comment about how
they were surprised they hadn't made it up to X12 yet, and I remembered this
wiki entry.

I'm a huge fan of these kinds of articles. Unless you really suffer through
something and learn it really well, it's unlikely you'll gain the full breadth
of wisdom that's acquired through years of experience.

I posit that genuinely trying to learn from history is actually incredibly
difficult. For starters, sometimes it might be difficult to even get access to
the knowledge. But even when you manage to acquire access to large amounts of
information, you have to consume and process it. You might have the knowledge
of hindsight to help guide you, but at the same time you might lack contextual
knowledge that might help provide answers as to why certain things ended up
the way they did. Did $FOO technology die because it sucked or because of
unfavorable external forces like reality?

I've made this exact comment before, but a lot of tech knowledge isn't easily
discoverable. You really just need to have the correct historical background
sometimes. My favorite example of this is filesystem layout in the different
unix-y systems. On my system I have the following folders: /bin, /sbin,
/usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin. How many developers know
why? Here's an explanation. [0]

All my work experience has been focused largely around web app development. As
we start creating more sophisticated applications on the browser, I'm sure
there's probably tons of lessons the web community will have to learn the hard
way, despite native desktop application developers having lived through their
own flavor of it. To give a recent example, when Redux began to blow up in
popularity, I remember seeing plenty of comments saying how it was just re-
implementing the same ideas from some old OS 20 years ago. That's great! I
probably wouldn't have even known about that. So what lessons did they learn?
Why aren't any of these great old wizards helping power level the younger
generation?

[0]
[http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...](http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html)

