Comment by ninkendo

I don’t know where I heard this analogy, but there are lots of things in life that don’t change linearly, but asymptotically to some target, and the analogy ad absurdum goes something like: “Thousands of years ago we thought the earth was flat, now we think it’s round, what’s next? A torus?”

The idea being that there is a period of massive change as we figure out how something ought to work, but then once we do, the change gradually slows and then stops. Spreadsheets are basically a solved problem, and they’re also very useful, so for certain types of work, changing it is probably only going to make it worse. Multiply that by all sorts of different types of software, and it’s hard to find any areas where we fundamentally need a new paradigm.

So it’s not surprising that 25 years ago, software was changing all the time, and since then it only seems like we’ve changed the window dressing. Because most of the time, we actually got it right 25 years ago, and there’s no reason to change it further.