Comment by the_overseer
1 month ago
It absolutely does. I cannot believe I am reading this on HN... Do you think the idea of a pointer changed? That you need locks when accessing variables when doing multithreading? That principles like "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept" have changed? In fact, almost nothing changed from 2005 to now in any conceptual form.
I agree with your general point, but Postel’s law definitely isn’t as universally accepted now as in 2005. Obviously its applicability is totally context-dependent. But I would say that there’s a trend to having smaller systems which are stricter with their inputs.
The short answer is that these things don't really exist anymore for most (business) applications when you stopped writing it in C.
So the things you mention indeed is experience you need to get rid of as you move to other software stacks and other technologies.
And end up writing the usual garbage that takes 2 GB of RAM just for a chat application... No. Acting like those concepts disappeared just because you write Javascript instead of C makes no sense. It still does memory allocation. You still need to manage it. Thinking that the virtual machine/compiler is doing "magic" is exactly what is wrong with most code today.