> To put it in another way: as the power of available machines grew by a factor of more than a thousand, society’s ambition to apply these machines grew in prop

> To put it in another way: as the power of available machines grew by a factor of more than a thousand, society’s ambition to apply these machines grew in proportion, and it was the poor programmer who found his job in this exploded field of tension between ends and means. I always thought that it was easier to be a programmer in the old days. Back when you could assess the performance of a program by counting the number of CPU cycles. All you had to learn was an assembly manual (a mere hundred pages?) and you knew everything there was to know about programming for that architecture. And there weren't that many architectures. Now we have non-deterministic CPUs, hundreds of high level programming languages, multiple operating systems, an entire jungle.