Blogs:JaroslavTulach:Theory:DiamondsVsStars
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(New page: Is it uncommon that the same invention is discovered multiple times? Multiple times by different people? At the same time? It is indeed surprising to see something like that, however if yo...)
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Revision as of 20:37, 25 September 2008
Is it uncommon that the same invention is discovered multiple times? Multiple times by different people? At the same time? It is indeed surprising to see something like that, however if you look back at the history of science, it is not that uncommon. I know that lightning rod has been independently invented by at least two people in the middle of 18th century. What was so special then that allowed such independent break-through?
For a centuries great mathematicians were troubled by Euclid's fifth postulate. It felt somewhat unnatural compared to the first four, the general expectation was that it is not necessary and it can be derived from the four others. Many tried, yet nobody succeeded. However, at the begging of 19th century things changed. Independently wikipedia::János_Bolyai, wikipedia::Nikolai_Ivanovich_Lobachevsky and maybe also wikipedia::Carl_Friedrich_Gauss discovered that fifth postulate is independent on the others. As such we can have geometries accepting and denying it and yet they'll make sense. Why at that time? Why three people at once?
There are many more cases that exhibit such coincidence. I do not think anyone has reasonable explanation for that, my personal feeling is that each era has something in the air that turns people's attention towards similar problems and tunes their mind to discover similar solutions.
I've been thinking about the laws of proper API design since 2001 and for a long time I believed that I am the only one who cares about such topic. I was pleasantly surprised during the Java One 2005 fully crowded BOF. However I still believed NetBeans is the only organization that does some research in this area. You can imagine how much I was surprised when I found out, at the end of 2005, that the Josh Bloch also spend some time thinking API design. And that was not enough, my surprise even grew, when I found out that 80% of his observation in his presentation are similar to mine. There must have been something in the air, mustn't it?
As one comment stated: These things are a lot in Jaroslav Tulach's new book. Only real difference is that 'diamonds' above are 'stars' there..
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