History of Science and Technology Q&A for Kids and Others (November 17, 2021)

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Are you familiar with Norbert Wiener's work? Is it relevant to current computer science at all? - Do you have any interesting stories/comments about Frederick P. Brooks? - What did you learn from The Mythical Man Month? (and when did you first read it?) - Dear Dr. Wolfram, what is your opinion on John Backus' lecture from 1977: "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"? - Was it even one cornerstone for your thinking? - Did general system theory and systems theory die out and why? - Does functional programming count as liberation from von Neumann style? - Do you think scientific software development has a very different development practice? - Are you saying that flowchart descriptions of algorithms and computations originate from systems theory/general systems theory? I always thought that is just a part of modern computer science. - Regarding what you just mentioned about education and teaching programming, what are your thoughts generally on how far our higher level languages are abstracting more and more away from the core metal? Do you worry about future generations of programmers not understanding core fundamentals and that we might come become stunted in terms of coming up with new languages and computing paradigms due to a lack of expertise? - Were you ever involved in the development of a kind of software that you now think might actually be morally questionable in some sense?