I remember my dad telling me that a "science history" class would be mostly useless from a practical standpoint as the study of science would include all of the really important bits of the history of science as a matter of course. This may be accurate when approaching physics, but CS is a very young field.
Just reading Knuth can give you a fantastic window into what has been done before. Looking into the history of Bell labs and Xerox PARC can make you understand the reality of what you suggest.
I'm not in any way suggesting that there's nothing new to invent in CS, but the current mindframe in many devs is that the state of the art is akin to quantum mechanics following Newtonian physics by a couple of decades.
The current revolutions in CS are mostly capability based rather than concept based. The ideas are relatively old, but the technology has allowed them to come to fruition.
I think it would be beneficial for all new CS practitioners to have access to a history of CS, as they would not just realise that the current trends aren't particularly new, but that there are a huge number of equally old ideas that are probably ready for prime time, but weren't feasible when first suggested.
History and Philosophy of science is definitely a field of study: http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/ - it definitely doesn't come through from learning the subject in the normal manner, because that tends to present a "finalised" view of science that doesn't include any of the dead ends or lengthy mysteries.
HPS for CS wouldn't be a whole graduate course, but would be a worthwhile module in a larger course.
I'm pretty certain that I'm not the only Cambridge HPS graduate here.
It would be interesting to see some of the thinking behind current approaches to HPS being applied to development teams, both as teams and as part of the larger community of developers
Just reading Knuth can give you a fantastic window into what has been done before. Looking into the history of Bell labs and Xerox PARC can make you understand the reality of what you suggest.
I'm not in any way suggesting that there's nothing new to invent in CS, but the current mindframe in many devs is that the state of the art is akin to quantum mechanics following Newtonian physics by a couple of decades.
The current revolutions in CS are mostly capability based rather than concept based. The ideas are relatively old, but the technology has allowed them to come to fruition.
I think it would be beneficial for all new CS practitioners to have access to a history of CS, as they would not just realise that the current trends aren't particularly new, but that there are a huge number of equally old ideas that are probably ready for prime time, but weren't feasible when first suggested.