Thanks for the link to the article, although I'm so busy it might be a week or two before I get a chance read. Joel usually writes well. Lightly skimming it seems to be about strings et al. I've seen some very clever implementation of strings in "C-land" (I've even a fancy one of my own which I've never polished the rough edges off) with some nice coding concepts that'd do well in a CS course.

Simple things like how hardware has evolved and the concepts brought in are useful. Some very basic concepts have application elsewhere and can be surprisingly "deep", e.g. caching, indirect references (in the very early days memory refs. were direct...), various types of look-up tables, etc.

On the subject of history, one of the reasons people like Joel "see" well is that they saw the history pass and understand why things are the way the are. The current schemes are really designed so much as evolved if you think about. I think you get a lot deeper understanding of a subject if you understand its history. The same is true of most fields (I'm a computational biologist and I can say the same is true of biology and most of the "hard" sciences).