Also we went from compilers with an IDE that had a debugger, profiler, built-in help and would fit on a 3.5" disk and would load on machines with 640KiB RAM (Turbo Pascal) to chat apps or password managers that are hundreds of megabytes and regularly gobble up more than a gigabyte of memory because they ship with their own browser.
Something is lost along the way.
Definitely.
My point is more that it seems to have been the way of the world for the past few decades. I’m arguing it’s nothing new, basically a trope at this point.
And once that is said, if we care about it, what do we do about it? Besides just repeating it.
You heard right! Most JavaScript and PHP in the world _is_ profoundly shitty. It's taken 20 years of intense research to make JavaScript compilers that are almost good enough to mostly optimize away the design foibles of the language.
Progress!
(I’m half kidding)
Coding per se is not hard. Proper engineering is. I do hope this change brings a change in focus (people train in algorithms, efficiency, solid development patterns) but I am afraid it won’t be the case.
And for those who might care about these things, they’ll probably just be facing constant pressure to deliver more, faster, perhaps with less.
One of the issue about literacy in algorithms, data modeling, efficiency, development patterns, systems designs… is that people either aren’t aware of them (and in the best case scenario reinvent the wheel), don’t care about them, or feel they aren’t given the time to invest in learning them (or worse, might be penalized for it).
Enlighten us.