Are retrospective / modern-perspective questions on-topic?

Question

Computing history has long been part of our scope. Retrospectives – looking back at then, from the perspective of now – are an important part of historical discourse, and we often get people trying to post retrospectives in answers or comments (see discussion of a recent example). Retrospective questions might include:

• How does Quake's Fast Inverse Square Root technique compare to modern approaches?
• Have the Microsoft Office redesigns resolved or exacerbated the priority inversion problems present in Microsoft Office 2003?
• Why don't we use SGML any more?

Do we want to allow questions that solicit retrospectives?

Answer 1

Yes, we should allow these. old-hardware-adaptation questions are about using retro hardware in a modern context, and we allow those. Questions about on-topic ideas in a modern context / from a modern perspective should be allowed, for similar reasons: keeping history in a separate, isolated context is not a good way to preserve it.

Answer 2

My view is that contemporary perspective is always going to be present, we simply can’t help it, but it should not be the primary focus of a question.

One problem is that what is “modern” is a moving target. Look at Stack Overflow, which has always focused on state-of-the-art solutions, and yet it is now often called a museum of jQuery. Computing paradigms and concepts don’t age as quickly as specific libraries, but answers would still be more at risk of becoming outdated than those that explicitly focus on a limited, specific time frame.

Another is that, especially with the examples given here, I would expect such questions to be open-ended and subjective, which is not something the Stack Exchange model supports well. Were I to encounter any of these in the wild, I would have probably voted to close each as opinion-based.