This seems to be a recurring phenomenon on HN. Why is the timestamp given so much importance?

It's a violation of the implicit convention of the site, not because it's old, but because the year is not in the title. Without that, it's easy to not notice, losing valuable context.

Because things change fast in the industry.

Yet mainstream languages are just catching up now to the state of the art of 30 years ago.

Good thing HN hasn't gone mainstream.

Too fast to get it right. We're back to square one a few years ago: high rate of crappy code.

The N in HN is supposed to mean "News". Imagine a news paper that reprints issues from six years ago.

The problem in the software industry isn't a lack of best practices, it's a lack of practitioners fully aware of the best practices. News isn't so much a function of when something happened as when someone heard about it first.

There is unfortunately also the problem of too many "best practices", that gets popularized, dogmatized and horribly misused.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

The age of an article has no bearing on how interesting a good hacker would find it.

To make myself clear, I personally don't care that much about older articles. Anyway, I think it's good hn practice for older articles to put the year in title ... since many users might expect "news" or are old enough to have been pointed to those articles several times.

Wait until you find out that some of dijkstra's letters make it to the front page.

More snake oil from Fowler, more like.

Fowler's persona aside, have you found any specific flaws in the article in question?