Comment by throwawaylinux
3 years ago
> Software engineers: let's completely undo all that engineering by moving everything apart as far as possible. Hmmm, still too fast. Let's next add virtualization and software stacks with shitty abstractions.
That's because the concept which is even more impactful than agriculture and the computer, and makes them and everything else in our lives, is abstraction. It makes it possible to reason about large and difficult problems, to specialize, to have multiple people working on them.
Computer hardware is as full of abstraction and separation and specialization as software is. The person designing the logic for a multiplier unit has no more need to know how transistors are etched into silicon than a javascript programmer does.
None of that means anything.
The web is slower than ever. Desktop apps 20 years ago were faster than today's garbage. We failed.
Billions of people are on the internet now, vs 20 years ago. I dare say millions of lives have been saved (due to various things) in the past 20 years, due to the things built and deployed on the web.
We may have failed at some abstract notion of craftsmanship or performance efficiency. But we as an industry shipped. We shipped a lot, actually. A lot of it also sucked. But not enough to say the whole industry was a failure, IMHO.
> None of that means anything.
What are you having difficulty understanding? I'll be happy to try help.
> The web is slower than ever.
No it isn't.
> Desktop apps 20 years ago were faster than today's garbage.
Some are, some aren't. For the same thing they clearly aren't. A typewriter makes your PC of 20 years ago look glacial garbage, if that's your standard.
> We failed.
Speak for yourself. Computers are used far more often, for more things, and by more people than they were 20 years ago, and nothing they used to be used for has been replaced by something else. You'll always have the get off my lawn types, but you did in the 2000s from the curmudgeons stuck in the 80s too.
I must have hit a nerve. Saying that computers are used more often and by more people makes my assessment even more impactful.
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