You know, this is all said very earnestly but the problem is that it tends to ignore the fact that many, many great things have been achieved with c

You know, this is all said very earnestly but the problem is that it tends to ignore the fact that many, many great things have been achieved with current technology. We could look at our software infrastructure as having two goals, (1) be good for experts, and (2) be good for normal people. Obviously, we're crushing it as (1). Linux, PostgreSQL, V8, GHC and so on are just disgustingly amazing feats of engineering. Nobody here is going to argue that Netflix, Google, or even your local dev shop don't do incredible work. Now let's look at (2). Normal people have a super sad relationship with computers. They can't compose one program with another (webapps aren't very good at this). They can't run a command repeatedly in an automated fashion (hard to do with a mouse). Their data is smeared across a dozen different servers, one for each webapp they use. Companies regularly do tricky things with export formats to make it hard for them to get their data back. In general, non-technical people just have an awful time. It's them we could do better by.