In the field that I work in (audio software) there are dozens of things that we can do in software now that were unimagined even in 1990. Polyphonic note editing? Utterly transparent time stretching? Even just the ability to do huge amounts of serious DSP on generic CPUs has completely altered the entire landscape of music production (and the software that is used to do it).
The same is true of so many other fields.
What hasn't changed much is the sort of software that is concerned with entering, editing and generating reports on data. The business/consumer focused versions of this stuff have changed from being built with tools provided by Oracle in the 1980s to using various web stacks, but the basic model - data input, fetch some data and present in a GUI - remains unchanged. And perhaps that's because the task hasn't really changed much, and what we have is actually fairly good at doing it.
But switch over to other areas where data-driven applications are important - many scientific disciplines for example - and even there you will find huge expansions in what is possible, particularly in terms of visualization (or auralization) as a way to help humans explore data.
And FFS, Google freakin' maps! Yes, something like it existed 10 years ago, but have you actually used it while driving recently! It's not bringing about world peace or solving hunger, but good grief, that is an absolute marvel of the composition of so many different areas of CS and software engineering into one incredibly user-friendly tool that I don't even know what to say other than "use the 2nd lane from the right and then turn left at the light".
It's important not to take really good pieces of software and services for granted, yet it's something we all do every day.
This is so true. In fact, the user to whom you are replying is the creator of one of those really good pieces of software: Ardour [0].
If others who read this comment are users of Ardour, please consider doing a $5 monthly donation to Paul on PayPal.
Thanks for the plug, even if it feels a bit out of place here (and most of our supporters only pay $1/month, which is fine too).
Consider that these things aren't really due to the practice of making software becoming better, but rather simply that hardware has become ludicrously powerful so as to enable this at all. It's the hardware portion of IT that deserves the gold medal here.
It is true that they both benefit from more powerful hardware, but these examples required significant advances in software too.
You are right that the particular examples of audio software capabilities do not in and of themselves bring anything in particular to music.
But the timestretching stuff has totally changed how huge numbers of people now make music, because they can work with audio that is in the wrong key and/or at the wrong tempo, without really thinking about it.
Do I think that this results in an aesthetic leap forward for music itself? I do not. In fact, probably the opposite in many senses. But that is true of so many human technologies, not just software. Some people would even argue that the advent/invention of well tempered tuning (and the concomittant move away from just intonation) hurt music in the west, and that was just as much the result of "sufficient engineering hours" as anything in the software world.
Also, just to correct you, 20 years ago, I guarantee you that nobody, absolutely nobody, believed that you could ever do polyphonic note editing. When Melodyne first demonstrated it, most people who knew anything about this just had their jaws hit the floor. It was absolutely not an "utterly conceivable consequence", even though in retrospect of course it now all seems quite obvious.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3679550?seq=1
"The real power of a neural net is its ability to compute solutions for distributed representations. In most cases, the solutions for these complex cases are not obvious. The pitch class representation of pitch is a local rather than a distributed one. In this case a possible solution for the chord classification problem is apparent without the use of a learning algorithm. A net containing 36 hidden units, one representing each of the possible major, minor, and diminished triads, could be constructed so as to map chords to chord types. Thus our interest in using a pitch class representation was not to find this obvious solution, but to find a solution which used a minimum number of hidden units. We hypothesized that three hidden units would be adequate and that the hidden units would form concepts of the intervals found in triads: i.e., major third, minor third, perfect fifth, and diminished fifth.
Each pitch-class net used 12 input units to represent the 12 pitches of the chromatic scale and 3 Output units to represent chord type. The number of hidden units and the values of the learning parameters are summarized in Table 1 for each of the eight pitch class nets discussed. Net 1 had an adjacent layer architecture as shown in Fig. 2 and three hidden units. It identified 25 percent of the chords after more than 11,000 learning epochs. When a fully connected architecture was used in conjunction with three hidden units in Net2, 72 percent of the chords were identified after 2,800 learning epochs. "
Neither of those papers cover any of the technology or ideas behind what Melodyne introduced with polyphonic note editing, which allowed the editing (in time and/or pitch space) of a single note within the audio of a polyphonic performance.
I'm entirely fine with saying "getting computers to do things humans have done for a long time isn't really progress". I'm not sure it's true.
One of the primary problems with DAWs as conceived initially was that they were closed, proprietary systems comprised of stupid-expensive hardware to even just open the dang application. This helped to facilitate the inescapable bubble in which the Mass Media finds itself today, playing right into their competition-killing hands. So of course, the world was stagnant for 20+ years, since the only people that had access to this software were "audio professionals," who had the creativity, ingenuity, and passion of a wet noodle. And they did predictably lame things with it all.
When only Kanye West and T-Pain had access to polyphonic note editing, it was pretty lame indeed. But access is, in itself, novel. The world has since changed considerably, and we have projects like Ardour in part to thank for this.
The Dunning-Kruger effect can be fiendishly subtle. So many people are limited by their experience, they don't stop to think (as you have) and imagine what fields outside theirs have taken advantage of in information systems.
I agree with the article that in the mainstream web/app ecosystem, there is a lot of unnecessary trash. Through my own experience, I've seen duplication of libraries and APIs that just frustrates. On those fronts, yes, it would be nice to have a little less paradox of choice.
But as you have graciously pointed out, there are domains undreamt of by the author that wouldn't give up the progress of the last 70 years for any amount of gold, and have much need of software still. Thank you for your examples.
Right, so now what is popular music today? Vocalists who can't sing in tune without help from technology, and musicians who never play more than a few bars at a time in studio because it is all stitched together digitally, and live performances that are just lip-synching to a playback. It's artificial from end to end.
Yesterday on youtube I watched two hour+ live concerts, both made available by the lead artist (Dhafer Youssef). The first was a more jazz inflected performance (not suprising given Mark Guiliana and Chris Jennings as the rhythm section), the second was more "world music" (also not suprising with Zakir Hussain on tabla and Husnu Selendecir on clarinet). Both featured Youssef playing oud and singing in his incredible melismatic style. One was recorded in 2014, one in 2106.
The music was utterly incredible. Virtuosic performances of the highest levels, astonishing compositional and improvisational music structures. And amazing sound quality (though sadly one was marred a little by clipping).
You don't have to like this particular music. Just stop focusing on "popular music", which has ALWAYS been dominated by dreck of one sort of another. Remember that there is (and often always has been) a huge universe of incredible music out there from cultures around the world, reflecting both tradition and experimentation, skill and inspiration, solo brilliance and music collaboration, virtuosity and taste.
Lamenting what the kids are doing with Ableton Live or FL Studio when you can watch Dhafer Youssef play live for 2+ hours with Tigran Hamasayan, Mark Guiliana, Zakir Hussain (or whatever floats your boat) is just wasting your time and your life!
UIs have not only gotten prettier, but in general, UX has improved significantly in the past 20 years.
Take something like Google/Apple Maps and compare it to the tools available back in 2000. Sure, you could Mapquest some directions and print them out. But nowadays, you don't even have to think about planning your drive out. You hop in the car and navigate to your location. Need to stop somewhere for gas? Search along the route and find the cheapest gas with the shortest detour (not based on distance, but an accurate time estimation based on traffic/lights/etc) with your favorite restaurant nearby. Traffic up ahead? Get a suggested reroute in real-time. Need to take an exit? The app will tell you exactly which lane to be in to anticipate the next turn. Road debris/collision ahead? The app will let you know. Tioga pass closed? You don't even have to think about it since the app will route you via the correct pass from the start. Traveling via public transit in a new city, walking, biking? The app will give you directions tailored for your specific mode of travel.
All of this, happening in real-time, on a device that fits in your pocket, while driving in your car.
I could bring up the same examples for any other type of service. The fact that so many dismiss these legit, quality of life, improvements just shows how jaded many of you are. Sure, we aren't making breakthroughs at the fundamental levels of software, but that's only because we haven't even gotten close to reaching the limits of our current capabilities.
FWIW, there are at least two layers of map that map apps have no clue about that I find essential as a cyclist: how much shade am I going to get while going down a road in a city that routinely has temperatures that are near the top end of what the human body can deal with? And how bad is the road surface in a constantly-sinking swamp city full of potholes and half-assed repairs?
There’s other layers - I don’t need to worry about whether or not I want to trade a longer route for clawing my way up a steep grade now that I don’t live in Seattle, for instance.
I think in a lot of ways, UI ebbs and flows; a lot of modern UI feels pretty terrible and non-intuitive, and re-designed for the sake of being re-designed.
And at the same time, writing software is tremendously easier than 20, or even 10 years ago. But maybe that's an ebb-and-flow issue as well. I tried adding React to an existing project last week, and was completely unable to. Everything broke. I'm debating which is the less-bad option - create a new repo, starting with React and gluing everything else around it, or moving just-the-react parts into a repo of their own. I'm tired of trying to figure out how to glue disparate, opinionated things together. I'm missing the Unix philosophy the author is talking about.
I think we're still figuring out UIs. As someone who sucks at them myself, I often wonder where are the modern Bruce Tognazzini's. I'm still reminded of a point on UI design he made that the corners of the desktop in a WIMP are special because they are infinitely large targets - you just fling the mouse pointer there and hit them. This point was of particular interest to me as an early Linux desktop (FVWM) user with virtual desktops (3x3) that you could configure to flip between when the mouse got near the edge, so it broke the infinite corners convention.
I'd like to find people who are thinking about UI's as deeply as the AskTog articles used to.
I wouldn't even say this is true. I hate most UIs out there. There seems to be little thought given to how they appear and are interacted with on a wide-variety of devices.
In general, I just don't like a lot of æsthetic out there either.