This is an interesting viewpoint, but I don't understand what this has to do with "today's" software. Nor do I understand why you think it's primarily towers of

This is an interesting viewpoint, but I don't understand what this has to do with "today's" software. Nor do I understand why you think it's primarily towers of shit. I don't think we have great ways of encoding domain knowledge, let alone turn it into software (and I wonder if we ever will). Encoding domain knowledge is mostly about human to human communication, and there is some value in using programs as a communication medium, but I think transferring and extending domain knowledge is primarily a human process (meetings, documentation, strategy documents, etc..) that software would actually slow down. I honestly find today's software quite fantastic. I don't know what tree Jonathan Blow is climbing, but compared to the 80ies, it is unbelievably easy to find good code, good books, just an infinity of resources on every aspect of software you would like to target, from the intricacies of whatever pipelines your CPU has to large scale distributed systems to pragmatic product thinking in software architecture. When I started programming, I was lucky to find Abrash's book about performance, and... that was it. Nowadays, not only are there a million videos on youtube, but I can literally look at the internals of most advanced optimizing compilers under the sun, and have direct access to all the published academic research on the same topics. In fact, the reason so many people can just grab javascript and create a full webapp in a couple of days is because so much amazing work is being done on low-level optimization. Not only that, but proper software engineering technique that were hit or miss even just 10 years ago are common in even the smallest javascript projects (source control, versioning, CICD, unit tests, automatic linting and analysis, packaging, often solid collaborative development guidelines). I regularly switch between counting cycles in baremetal embedded and writing e-commerce javascript and PHP applications. In embedded my metric is writing tight software (because tight means cheaper chip), in the other, my metric is to make a retail business successful, and software is but a tiny part of that. 1I literally do not care that my whatever analytics job running overnight takes 2h when I could optimize it down to 30 seconds, because as funny as it sounds, tweaking the CSS of the email banner or handling proper retina ad-banners is a much more relevant problem. Seeing the amount of talented and dedicated people working in software, I can't but think of Jonathan Blow as someone who is deeply incurious and small-minded: he cannot fathom what richness is out there, and assumes that other people wouldn't be able to leverage said richness either. I'm glad he is a successful indie game developer, but that is not the high horse to ride on he thinks it is.