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There is a nice saying in german: "In former times everything was better, even the future!" I think software development and UX have improved a lot in the last

There is a nice saying in german: "In former times everything was better, even the future!" I think software development and UX have improved a lot in the last decades. Build tools are sometimes really annoying, but does anyone remember how life was without them? Does anyone want to pull a GB of libs from the web by hand? (Obviously nobody would do that and prefer to reinvent the wheel with help of the "XY Cookbook"). The author also criticises "flat UI", but does anyone remember the ugliness of UI's in the nineties with all their borders and pseudo shadows? http://83.133.184.251/winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/30-da78050b4fccfee8c90c3977721c37ba-Corel%20Draw%203%20-%20Paint.png http://83.133.184.251/winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/30-... Or think about IDE's! Does anyone want to change IntelliJ for JBuilder? I think, what the author really means is the move from solo inventors and hackers to a complex and more or less mature industry. Not everything is fun in this industry, but it also not as bad as one could think after reading this article.

feifan 6y ago
FWIW, I actually prefer those 90s UIs, not because the borders and shadows are "pretty", but because they're dense. Flat UI also came with big gobs of whitespace and padding … to me it feels like bubble-wrapping everything.
ouid 6y ago
I think the future was decidedly better before, in fact it's so much better that almost all modern sci-fi is written in some x-punk genre, where x just refers to a time period, and x-punk refers to the vision of the future from that time period.
Oreb 6y ago
I’ve never used (nor even heard about) JBuilder, but Macintosh Common Lisp back in the 1990s was (at least to me) far more user friendly and fun to use than IntelliJ today. It even felt a lot faster, despite running on hardware from the previous millennium.

feifan 6y ago

FWIW, I actually prefer those 90s UIs, not because the borders and shadows are "pretty", but because they're dense. Flat UI also came with big gobs of whitespace and padding … to me it feels like bubble-wrapping everything.

ouid 6y ago

I think the future was decidedly better before, in fact it's so much better that almost all modern sci-fi is written in some x-punk genre, where x just refers to a time period, and x-punk refers to the vision of the future from that time period.

Oreb 6y ago

I’ve never used (nor even heard about) JBuilder, but Macintosh Common Lisp back in the 1990s was (at least to me) far more user friendly and fun to use than IntelliJ today. It even felt a lot faster, despite running on hardware from the previous millennium.