How did people build the tools we take for granted?
This question asks for a history and for ideas -- explicit and implicit -- which enabled the development of these technologies. Often, there does not exist a written or even oral record for compiling a history. Sometimes, we can trace, using observed behaviors and uncovered artifacts -- anthropology and archeology -- to recompile a history, sometimes even rebuilding replicas of our present tools, so that we can better understand and appreciate how they enable our world today.
These verbs -- build, develop, compile, trace, recompile, rebuild -- ought to be intimately familiar to software professionals everywhere. They're foundational to the language of the software development lifecycle. They're also instructive of a perspective that I hold dear: that software is about people and the things they do.
This is why I am using the phrase "Software Archeology" to describe this writing project. The phrase is not new.
Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas wrote
Understanding "what [previous programmers] were thinking" is critical to understanding how and why they wrote the code the way they did.
You might find lost treasure -- buried domain expertise that's been forgotten.
My project emphasizes a deeper tone of the phrase, reaching hundreds of years in the past to explain code in use today. My goal in these essays is to find lost treasures of software, particularly in the long history of applied mathematics.