I'll be the devils advocate. Why? I can understand calculus perfectly fine without understanding how people got there. In fact, I'd argue much of what you learn before call--in the order of discovery--actively hinders understanding.
Because advancing science and mathematics is not a straight line but full frustrations inside a cloud of uncertainty and anxiety. It is important to appreciate what the world looked like before the discovery and how someone tackled a problem to change this view of the world because when you yourself make discoveries you will be in the exact same situation.
However if all you care is to use what has been discovered, which is becoming less and less valuable, then you don't need to learn history of mathematics and science.
Although this is not good evidence but rather an anecdote, I cannot remember any significant person who has made fundamental contributions to mathematics or science that was completely ignorant of the history of the field.
Let me give an example from calculus - a continuous function. How do you define the concept? The definiton of the concept changed quite a lot in the past 250 years or so. (Please take the following explanation with a grain of salt, I am not writing a thesis on the topic, just pointing out stuff.)
For Euler, continuous function was pretty much intuitive notion. He only composed functions with only occasional point discontinuities, so it wasn't a big deal for him to even not have a proper definition.
Then people like Bolzano and Dirichlet came along and realized they need a better definition, because there can be some really weird cases. So they formalized the continuity with limits (which is typical way how to define it in basic calculus).
Later yet, people understood better what it means to be a real number by looking at notions such as countability and measurability. While this doesn't affect continuity itself, it does affect understanding of what is a real fuction.
Then came more abstraction, to metric spaces and eventually topological spaces, which redefined "continuous function" yet again as a morphism between topological spaces.
Another shift in thinking about continuity happened when theory of distributions was invented. This actually completely reverses the intuition - instead of properly definining reals and then on top of real function define what it means to be continuous, you define the "function" itself in an entirely different way, in which the continuity becomes somewhat irrelevant.
Finally, modern mathematics is quite obsessed with category theory and various ways to make everything into some algebra. In a way, we care less what reals really are, only what we can do with them (or their sets).
So I think to understand the intuitive relation of all these different definitions, you need to understand a little bit of history.
Many people will find it easier to follow maths lessons if there are a few bits of history sprinkled in here and there. It adds a human element and honoring the great ones hundreds of years (or even millennia) after they are dead serves as an implicit demonstration of how important their discoveries are to us. Not a terribly powerful demonstration, but less futile than repeatedly yelling "hey, this is important!"
Also, mathematical concepts don't come with natural names attached. But we need consistent labels for successful communication. It's much easier to not confuse those labels if you know a bit about the history that led to the naming.
Perhaps the downvotes are because the comment is pretty empty. You could say that about effectively anything. It doesn't add to the discussion. If, for example, you have information indicating that generics are on the horizon or that Pike et al. have discussed the possibility of adding generics, that would be a lot more interesting and substantive.
I downvoted it because it added nothing to the conversation. The word "yet" by itself does not add anything meaningful, isn't funny, has no depth, does not provide any new information, is not a good conversation lead.... yeah, so that's why I downvoted it.
The indications from the people who've replied to you are that they downvoted you for the same reason you're now upset: they didn't think you were making an effort to converse.
Fix for some value of fix. Go's lack of generics make the data structure offerings pitiful. Just look at heap: it's worse than c.
There is a role for a language like that, but calling it fixing c++ ignores 90% of the reasons people use c++ in the first place. In fact, id say that go reminds me most of the version of c++ that operated as a preprocessor. It's almost exactly the same template implementation!
"Fix" in quotes, really -- I don't think the Go team ever pretended they were building a replacement, although they are certainly replacing C++ for their own work. That said, if you read Rob Pike's history of Go (previous link), they were mighty surprised to discover that Go didn't really entice C++ programmers at all; the crowd that Go appealed to were Ruby and Python developers who wanted a faster language that was still expressive and fast to compile.
> The actual decision needed could be done in a couple of Slack messages between two programmers
In my experience, those two programmers rarely have a good enough understanding of existing codebase and momentum to make good decisions. Without meetings, there is little way to avoid these problems.
Programmers are good at implementation, not (necessarily) decision making.
Also, meetings only make sense if everyone is focused on decision making; this is a company culture issue more than anything.
Wow, I never realized operators couldn't push fixes to their routers without permission. The internet is indeed a tragedy of the commons: trivial to ruin, but a Sisyphean task to fix.
Most admins would consider having network infrastructure's firmware change outside of their control a bug/misfeature. Not to mention most devices would require reboot to apply change.
And to be able to remotely change the code running a HUGE security issue.
The vast majority of admins don't even know that they're admins. They bought or received a cheap Netgear router, plugged it in, and never touched it again, except to maybe turn it off and on again when the internet was slow/down.
If you're an admin who cares about their infrastructure, you're not using a bargain-basement Netgear router, and if you are, you'll have gone through every single menu and seen the auto-update option.
Some operators do, mostly ISPs that lease routers to customers and retain a way to push firmware updates to them (for example, Comcast does this). But router manufacturers typically don't touch the device once it's out of their hands.
Note that cable modems (all of them, not just from Comcast) download their configuration from the provider every time they boot up. Ironically (since it uses TFTP, for one), this is called "secure provisioning".
They might give you a web interface where you can configure certain settings (e.g. integrated Wi-Fi) but the ISP ultimately has at least some control over any cable modem connected to it.
In many jobs that's totally worth it—chances are very low a stranger will need something high priority from you, and people who work with you will know how to communicate.
Email is good for a lot of things, but not for expecting processing quickly.
