"what is the biggest change in computer software in recent times?" (question from a friend)
his answer: the move away from the filesystem.
Another answer: Software is increasingly "trained" rather than procedurally programmed.
any other?
sorry, I dont understand. is recent software higher quality? lower?
is my question of lower quality?
@brewsterkahle A distrust in the end users, who apparently now need to be protected from themselves.
@brewsterkahle Software used to be developed with a tendency towards an engineering mindset, but we have switched to a production mindset.
When I first started programming in the late 90s, everybody cared (at least a little bit) about performance & resource use.
Today, I have to explain to junior devs that they should use an O(<n) algorithm instead of an O(n^3) one -- on a web app (so, a system that uses a text-based protocol & 3 different languages to remote-edit a rich text document to simulate the OS's built-in widgets), & why we don't need to spin up a whole VM for their 10 line python script.
Weirdly, this change seemed to happen at exactly the time that new machines stopped getting twice as beefy every 18 months & people started moving more and more of their computing to dinky resource-strapped pocket devices.
(If I wanted to be paranoid, I'd say that encouraging slow client-side technologies means that you can justify centralizing more and more power server-side on user experience grounds, but realistically I don't think the people making these decisions are capable of foreseeing their results)
@brewsterkahle @buherator: I think the implication from that point is that recent software is of lower quality.