The Fall of Innovation

It saddens me these days to see so few programmers that question the way things are done and simply accept as the best way to do things what is considered to be the standard. I fear innovation is being lost in this generation of developers since instead of questioning and trying to make new and better ways to accomplish tasks they simply take what is "standard" and conform to it.

Someone told me the other day, "I come from the school of thought, there's nothing special about me", and I think that's becoming more and more the norm. If everyone approached technology this way we could never move forward. Innovation is necessary for advance and the programming community is one of the most necessary places for this to occur. We become too comfortable with the coding practices of today and since we aren't forced to push beyond, we settle to what we know.