Comment by travisgriggs

Web Programming has stolen satisfaction from programming. At least for me.

I've coded in win32, XWindows, GTK, UIKit, Logo, Smalltalk, QT, and others since 95. I had various (and sometimes serious) issues with any of these as I worked in them. No other mechanism of helping humans interact with computation has been more frustrating and disappointing than the web. Pointing out how silly it all is (really, I have to use 3 separate languages with different computation models, plus countless frameworks, and that's just on the client side???), never makes me popular with people who have invested huge amounts of time and energy into mastering etheral library idioms or modern "best practices" which will be different next month. And the documentation? Find someone who did a quick blog on it, trying to get their name out there. Good luck.

The fact that an AI is an efficient, but lossy compression of the big pile, to help me churn it faster, it's actually kind of refreshing for me. Any confidence that I was doing the Right Thing in this domain always made me wonder how "imagined" it was. That fact that I have a stochastic parrot with sycophantic confidence to help me hallucinate through it all? That just takes it to 11.

I thought when James Mickens wrote "To Wash It All Away" (https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/towashitalla...), maybe someday things would get better. 10 years later, the furniture has moved and changed color some, but its still the same shitty experience.