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Comment by ftl | Hacker News Reader

"In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.

So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture."

Full conversation: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

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Blah blah blah.

In Shakespeare's day, his plays were ribald entertainment for the masses. People are continuously complaining about how the old ways were better, and one is entitled to one's opinion, but the old ways are in the past and gone. Soon the last person who remembers them will be dead and there will be no one to complain about it, so what's the point?

Wow, that's one of the most pretentious paragraphs I've ever read. I mean, let's use the exact same argument, swapping television for books:

"In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when widespread literacy came on the scene and some of its perpetrators thought it would be a way of getting the Bible to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand the Bible. What books were able to do was capture people as they were."

Except, historically that's absolutely wrong. Since the advent of printing, the Bible has been the most widely published book in the world because the masses, as they are, have historically been religious people.

OT: I did find it very interesting to learn that the second most popular book (up to the beginning of the twentieth century) was Euclid's The Elements after the printers were done pressing bibles.

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