"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?

@brewsterkahle Finally giving up on quality?

@buherator

sorry, I dont understand. is recent software higher quality? lower?

is my question of lower quality?

@brewsterkahle Sorry, not a native speaker here! What I mean (half-jokingly) is these days we - as in users and developers - just accept that our software is bad. We create higher layers of abstractions so ppl with minimal training can produce more sw, because we always need more sw somehow. Then ofc the abstractions leak, and the design doesn't make sense and UX is horrible. Then - if the lawyers and salesppl were smart enough - the producer can charge even more money for the fixes. And the buyers don't have alternatives and they just accept their faith because sw has always been buggy. And this is how you boil a frog.

@brewsterkahle Everything moved to the browser.

@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.

@brewsterkahle

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.

@brewsterkahle

(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.