5 ms·

Your question is flawed. We didn't go wrong. Programming is much more accessible to a much bigger audience today and we have better tools and techniques.

steve1977 3y ago
Why do we get so much less delivered then today?
eweise 3y ago
In terms of ease of use, we went very wrong. You need to be an expert to understand all the technologies involved in a react web app, and there is no easy drag and drop coding function included.
mschaef 3y ago
> Programming is much more accessible to a much bigger audience today and we have better tools and techniques. Much of your point seems debatable. I had a band director that was able to write a GUI app in 1992 on a 12MHz 80286 with a couple megabytes of memory. Put today's tooling in their hands and I don't think they'd be nearly as effective. Today's tools may be better by some definitions, but certainly not by all.
- asciiface 3y ago
  yeah I mean in highschool I was writing a bunch of VB6 in the computer lab study halls. I wrote a LAN chat program for the lab, a file encryption/decryption that used blowfish, I even wrote a basic UI-based RPG game for the lab. building a UI now with modern tools makes me lose sleep
  - gardenhedge 3y ago
    How does it make you lose sleep?
stcroixx 3y ago
My experience was very different. At my first software job in '98, there was a whole team of women in the 50s/60s that did VB. They had long careers doing COBOL/JCL before that. That entire demographic has all but disappeared from software. More people do software dev now, but they're all the same people generally and our industry suffers from this lack of real diversity.
adamrezich 3y ago
consider both 1.) the bare minimum knowledge one must know to successfully use, and 2.) the complexity of the underlying abstractions of, both a.) modern web app development and b.) Visual Basic desktop app development. not only is there much more to learn nowadays, but the stuff you have to learn is all domain-specific abstractions upon abstractions, any of which could be subject to change as frameworks' popularities wax and wane. obviously VB is not assembly by any stretch of the imagination, but consider how many layers of abstraction one forgoes in making a VB app vs. a modern web app—the situation is ridiculous.

steve1977 3y ago

Why do we get so much less delivered then today?

eweise 3y ago

In terms of ease of use, we went very wrong. You need to be an expert to understand all the technologies involved in a react web app, and there is no easy drag and drop coding function included.

mschaef 3y ago

> Programming is much more accessible to a much bigger audience today and we have better tools and techniques. Much of your point seems debatable. I had a band director that was able to write a GUI app in 1992 on a 12MHz 80286 with a couple megabytes of memory. Put today's tooling in their hands and I don't think they'd be nearly as effective. Today's tools may be better by some definitions, but certainly not by all.

asciiface 3y ago
yeah I mean in highschool I was writing a bunch of VB6 in the computer lab study halls. I wrote a LAN chat program for the lab, a file encryption/decryption that used blowfish, I even wrote a basic UI-based RPG game for the lab. building a UI now with modern tools makes me lose sleep
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  How does it make you lose sleep?

stcroixx 3y ago

My experience was very different. At my first software job in '98, there was a whole team of women in the 50s/60s that did VB. They had long careers doing COBOL/JCL before that. That entire demographic has all but disappeared from software. More people do software dev now, but they're all the same people generally and our industry suffers from this lack of real diversity.

adamrezich 3y ago

consider both 1.) the bare minimum knowledge one must know to successfully use, and 2.) the complexity of the underlying abstractions of, both a.) modern web app development and b.) Visual Basic desktop app development. not only is there much more to learn nowadays, but the stuff you have to learn is all domain-specific abstractions upon abstractions, any of which could be subject to change as frameworks' popularities wax and wane. obviously VB is not assembly by any stretch of the imagination, but consider how many layers of abstraction one forgoes in making a VB app vs. a modern web app—the situation is ridiculous.