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.cb WHY IS PROGRESS SO SLOW?

	Most commentators marvel at the rapid pace of science
and technology.  It seems to me that there is more reason to
ask why its pace is so slow.  When I look at what computer science
has discovered since I have been active it it, I ask what took
us so long.  Why didn't Turing or von Neumann or one of
their students write a paper on the inductive assertion method?
Why didn't I or one of my students discover how to represent recursive
LISP programs in first order logic in 1960 instead of waiting for
Cartwright to do it in 1977?  Certainly the idea of inductive assertions
and its value in proving properties of programs could have been
explained to von Neumann or Turing in 3 minutes, and Cartwright's
idea could have been explained to me in one minute - as it finally
was.  In these cases, the answer may well be that we weren't
smart enough - at least we weren't creative enough.  But there
are also other explanations.