Indeed, one of my major complaints about the computer field is that whereas Newton could say, "If I have seen a little farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants," I am forced to say, "Today we stand on each other's feet." Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way. Science is supposed to be cumulative, not almost endless duplication of the same kind of things.

~ Richard Hamming

It's humbling and brings me to something my mom reminded me of. This a woman who does not understand mathematics or computer science beyond me being able to explain object relations, entities, and functions in terms of people, people relationships, machines, and factories, but this is also a women who met my father soldering circuit boards in an assembly line and thus I exist. Anyway, she reminded me how our field is really in it's infancy, and I don't know whether it was the right time in my life to hear that, or it mattered more hearing it from her, but it struck me as important. I think more about the amount of humans that had to exist before Newton, Darwin, Einstein, in order to come up with concepts like - the alphabet, counting, methods of observation, and language - in order for those scientists to have made their contributions. I imagine that we face many more challenges than we are capable of knowing, of understanding, and of realizing - and it is not necessarily a bad thing. Computation makes me think I can have all the answers laid out in front of me, but the entire history of civilization (and all the bits of knowledge that haven't been or can't be written down) remind me that that is a blind fallacy. So I proceed with caution and confidence, despite relying on Oracle for my dayjob. :)