In the 70s and 80s programmers were working on fixing the problems that programmers faced in the 70s and 80s: memory management, GOTO spaghetti, efficient assem

In the 70s and 80s programmers were working on fixing the problems that programmers faced in the 70s and 80s: memory management, GOTO spaghetti, efficient assembly etc. In response we got heaps, garbage collectors, functional languages, virtual machines, compilers, debuggers, IDEs. Now most programmers spend most of their time dealing with problems of persistence, networking, parallelism, security, and massive codebases. In response we are creating scripting languages with slightly different syntax, adding closures to Java, and arguing about vim vs emacs. We're so obsessed with solving the problems of the 80s, my way, that we've just gotten trapped there.