2 ms·

I would argue that we are in the Dark Ages. Why? We live in an age where even the simplest software is relatively complex to develop, due to feature-bloat, ba

I would argue that we are in the Dark Ages. Why? We live in an age where even the simplest software is relatively complex to develop, due to feature-bloat, bad standardization, and lack of standardization. More importantly, we live in a world where the ruling companies have grown so big, none of them really care about innovating - they care about quarterly revenues. All of the big companies try to cater to watered-down standards (I'm looking at you W3C, ISO, RFC, EMCA, IANA, Khronos Group, etc). We need to take what we have learned, and hit the reset button. A new system architecture (goodbye x86 and 32-bit software), and new operating system (it should be a few megabytes large, at most), and new compiler, language, and virtual machine. Or we can just continue to live semi-comfortably and bitch about it every so often.

andrewflnr 15y ago
That's an interesting perspective. It really is hard to think of when things have been better, overall, for developers, but there is still a lot of stuff that stinks. I think the factors discussed in the article make it merely a matter of time when your (and my, for what it's worth) vision is fulfilled. The pressure caused by more people entering the field will force something to give. At our increasing rate of technological development and replacement, it could take just a couple years to take over once someone set it off. While I'm here, if we have One Hardware Architecture To Rule Them All, why do you think we would need a new VM?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
zeratul 15y ago
gavanwoolery: What you describe is the Renaissance. Dark Ages could be DOS or WIN 3.1 with PASCAL or VB and its short dominance over classical and forbidden beauty of Unix and C. I guess the title of the article should really read: "The Renaissance of Developers". Indeed, we are like the Renaissance men. We read a lot, learn a lot, and write a lot; different languages, different platforms, and different standards. We need to know how to admin, design, write, build, test, and deploy. Each of us has to be Galileo, da Vinci, Columbus, and Kepler in one person. What we are waiting is the era of positivism where methodological debates concerning clarity, replicability, reliability, and validity established modern science governed by experimentation and sound statistics. Mathematics applied in Physics, Physics in Chemistry, and Chemistry in Biology bring order and sanity the same one that developers are longing for in computer science and computer engineering.

andrewflnr 15y ago

That's an interesting perspective. It really is hard to think of when things have been better, overall, for developers, but there is still a lot of stuff that stinks. I think the factors discussed in the article make it merely a matter of time when your (and my, for what it's worth) vision is fulfilled. The pressure caused by more people entering the field will force something to give. At our increasing rate of technological development and replacement, it could take just a couple years to take over once someone set it off. While I'm here, if we have One Hardware Architecture To Rule Them All, why do you think we would need a new VM?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

zeratul 15y ago

gavanwoolery: What you describe is the Renaissance. Dark Ages could be DOS or WIN 3.1 with PASCAL or VB and its short dominance over classical and forbidden beauty of Unix and C. I guess the title of the article should really read: "The Renaissance of Developers". Indeed, we are like the Renaissance men. We read a lot, learn a lot, and write a lot; different languages, different platforms, and different standards. We need to know how to admin, design, write, build, test, and deploy. Each of us has to be Galileo, da Vinci, Columbus, and Kepler in one person. What we are waiting is the era of positivism where methodological debates concerning clarity, replicability, reliability, and validity established modern science governed by experimentation and sound statistics. Mathematics applied in Physics, Physics in Chemistry, and Chemistry in Biology bring order and sanity the same one that developers are longing for in computer science and computer engineering.