You're looking at this from a more academic perspective than my comment implied. Really, it's the whole clusterf&*^ of software engineering being conflated with computer science, when they are really not the same thing in any way.
There is a lot of practical implementation history that people are often woefully ignorant of, and it leads them to tread the same paths over and over and over.
- Here are the core GNU command line utilities; make, sed, grep, etc. They are battle-tested, use them, don't rewrite them a dozen times in JavaScript
- Here is the progression of version control tools that people have used over time, and some reasons why we've moved on from SourceSafe and rcs to Git.
- Here's the history of how people have done databases, flat-file, vs sql vs nosql
- etc, etc, etc.
Ah, I see what you mean. Apologies, I didn't mean to digress from the spirit of your comment, I suppose it just varies with experience: of the things mentioned, including web frameworks, I _did_ hear of the history of how people have done databases, but other than that GNU tools are just things I used to get the work done, and I learned git through open source. (Though I think it would make a great 'stuff you've learned put into practice' talk: diff algorithms, data structures, etc.)
There is a lot of practical implementation history that people are often woefully ignorant of, and it leads them to tread the same paths over and over and over.