A had a similar reaction to the article, and I appreciate your cosmic analogy. The metaphor that came to my mind was the long persistence of steam power after

A had a similar reaction to the article, and I appreciate your cosmic analogy. The metaphor that came to my mind was the long persistence of steam power after electric motors were invented. Initially, 'going electric' meant replacing your one giant steam boiler with one giant electric motor, and doing everything else the same way. The factory remained organized around the drive shafts and pulleys and mechanical distribution systems. There was little advantage. It took decades of experimentation to gain the insights of how many small motors and task lighting could allow a factory to be optimized for task flow, not power distribution. And then it took longer for those insights to diffuse through slow human networks. Hardware has developed so fast that software had no time or incentive to mature. Each decade's tech just gets ossified into the stack because hardware was making the stack faster at a better rate than human insight. Every few decades, we get lucky and an invention happens when the ecosystem can use it... so we get compilers and sql and automated tests. But then other insights like immutable data structs just stay niche. I hope that as hardware progress flattens, opportunities emerge for better software paradigms. Maybe this will coincide with the craft of software becoming introspective about it's myriad social issues.