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As I get older myself, this brand of cynicism seems to be a projection of death anxiety or possibly the "loss of innocence" where grand visions of how the world ought to be were not met.

1996 was 24 years ago. You are totally correct that the progress and change in this period has been incredible on the historical scale. But 24 years on the timeline of a human life is quite a significant portion, and some may feel that their expectations of futuristic utopia have been subverted, making them cynical.

25! Happy new year!

>> some may feel that their expectations of futuristic utopia have been subverted, making them cynical.

i know i do!

lot's of stuff about the future sucks, and i can't think of a way to fix anything important with faster garbage collection or better type systems... maybe that's the difference between makers and cynics. i guess i'll try harder :p

> and i can't think of a way to fix anything important with faster garbage collection or better type systems

I can, I am very hopeful better type systems will help heal the absolutely dreadful state of software robustness.

Better types (and by extension, better type systems) help eliminate many costly tests, improves knowledge transfer from senior engineers to junior engineers, makes refactoring and adapting to changing requirements a much less error-prone process where the computer can guide you, provides a more rigid way of breaking down problems into chunks instead of a procedural approach where good boundaries are harder to intuitively determine.

While education is what enables people to write better code with them, we need better type systems and languages that make this process easier for the average programmer to learn and use. Already languages like TypeScript, Kotlin and Swift are slowly getting many people to take a gander over the brick wall by exposing them to constructs like sum types and specific patterns like optionals and either/result types, that should fuel a little bit of hope at least!

EDIT: That's some visceral reaction. Would be nice to see some disagreement stated in text, or if any particular point needs further explaining, or to see if just hope of things improving is what's angering people.

heh, well, by "important" i meant like freedom, justice, and the continued existence of humanity. but like i was saying up-thread, i think software quality is important, and in that sense, ubiquitous and accessible type safety definitely seems like a Good Thing. i guess they might even help keep us out of trouble in those "important" areas.

EDIT: actually, you kinda cheered me up :)

I see (at least) two technological trends that may strongly influence "important" problems and that may be interesting to compare:

"3d-printification" or democratisation of manufacturing capabilities. When advanced manufacturing become cheap, generic and small scale you need less capital to create and design important hardware.

"UX-ification" of advanced programming practices or democratisation of software creation capabilities. When advanced software design, composition and implementation becomes cheap, generic and scalable you need less capital to create/design/implement software and to be in control of the software you want/need.

When those things come together the importance of capital will greatly diminish for some vital parts of life. It will not solve all problems but some. And maybe create other problems. But it should at the very least greatly impact "important" problems.

The "UX-ification" of software creation is the part where software engineers can be part of.

Disclaimer: Perhaps I have a naive assumption underlying all this - the idea that increased flexibility eventually "will lead" to apparent simplicity. But isn't living organisms kind of a proof of this? The amount of complexity that an animal needs to understand to continue living and reproduce is dwarfed by the complexity of the animal itself. Well, also cars and computers.

Something like that. Maybe. Goodnight.

The problem is that, while improved development technology does raise the floor, it also raises the ceiling, so equality don’t improve.

Some of us could host 2005 YouTube out of pocket, but it’s 2020, and people with fast connections expect 1080p video now, so it remains impossible for individuals to compete with corporations.

Yeah, that's a good point. I kind of expect that the ceiling should pop off at some point though. But I can't make a good argument for that.

Like, will it always make sense to add things to YouTube or will a more decentralised approach make more sense? Will single responsibility principle make sense at that scale? Can infrastructure costs be shifted around in flexible ways? Etc.

But yeah it's telling that Facebook was initially looking for a much more decentralised approach but gave up on it when adapting to reality and economics.

This article is just the IT equivalent of 'no good music gets made today' and so on. It's a combination of nostalgia and advancing age, the observation he's making is really no different. I remember software in 1996 too, and most of it really sucked. If you want to relive the 90s experience just go use some Oracle or IBM software. That will show you true stagnation.

> We're driving around in electric cars, carrying around cell phones that are orders of magnitude faster than desktop PCs from 1996, and communication technology

I'd argue that these are primarily hardware innovations, not software innovations. The OP mentions software, not technology in general.

See also Moore's law (hardware upgrades double computing speed every ~2 years) vs Proebsting's Law [1] (compiler upgrades double computing speed every ~18 years).

[1] http://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html

> The OP mentions software, not technology in general.

Hardware and software are closely intertwined. We couldn't design, develop, build, and run modern hardware without modern software packages. You're just not seeing the advances in software if you're only looking at famous web services technologies.

The whole article is extremely myopic, limited only to the author's narrow domain of web services and coding in text editors.

Okay - could you give some examples of where you think huge advances in software have been made?

Not OP but eBPF, Android ( phone, TV, auto) and iOS, ChromeOS, VS Code, Go, Swift, Powershell ( it's a terrible piece of software but a vast improvement for Windows), virtualisation, public cloud platforms ( virtualisation at huge scale with APIs), the Hashicorp stack, ZFS, LXC and later Docker, Kubernetes, Redis.

What you think of hardware innovations are often actually software innovations. Your iPhone doesn’t take a better picture because it has a better lens this year - it does because it has better software.

>> If an engineer in 1996 fell into a coma and woke up today, they'd be greeted with an entirely different world.

i was little and didn't know shit, but i was already learning to program, and i think about this all the time. like mind blown, every day. 8 threads and 2GB of ram in my cheap ass phone? crazy! and we got so good at writing compilers they give them away for free!

JS was way slow because MSIE wasn't supposed to compete with desktop apps :p also, transpilation, JIT, virtualization and containers seem like a pretty big deal to me -- virtualization was academic in the 90's.

also, a lot of that "old" stuff like python and ruby and even C++ really weren't as mature and feature-full. memory safety/auto-management and concurrency language features are prevalent now, and i think people don't always appreciate (or remember?) when your computer couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time.

it seems to me like our tools have clearly improved -- i think a more useful conversation could investigate how to apply what we now have to improving productivity, safety and security.

Virtualization isn't that recent. It at least goes back to the 60's with the IBM 360 mainframe.

For micros, it has been available, in some form, on x86 since 1985 when the 386 processor was first released. Remember the vm86 mode that let people run DOS apps under Windows 2.x?

> Remember the vm86 mode that let people run DOS apps under Windows 2.x?

That's not really virtualization. In the x86 world, hardware virtualization extensions don't crop up until 2003. Efficient dynamic binary translation (a key component for efficient virtualization without hardware support) I generally reckon to start with DynamoRIO (~2001), with Intel's Pin tool coming out in 2004.

(Do note that hardware virtualization does predate x86; I believe IBM 360 was the first one to have support for it, but I'm really bad with dates for processor milestones).

Just a data point. VMware Workstation came out as a product in 1999, and did excellent x86 virtualisation without hardware support using dynamic translation and code scanning techniques.

I agree it is generally not what people consider virtualization today, but it was still a form of early virtualization. It was amazing for the time, letting people run most of their DOS apps under Windows 386.

(Note VMware Workstation, as another poster pointed out, and even earlier "emulation" solutions like Bochs existed before 2003.)

> If an engineer in 1996 fell into a coma and woke up today, they'd be greeted with an entirely different world. We're driving around in electric cars, carrying around cell phones that are orders of magnitude faster than desktop PCs from 1996, and communication technology has evolved to the point that many of us are seamlessly working from home.

But these things were not driven by software innovations.

Having been an engineer in 1996. Really nothing wasn't foreseen by anyone with a feel for how things were going.

In 1996 a friend was dating an engineer with an electric car. She'd thrown a bunch of time and money into it. Had a range of about 80-90 miles and wasn't slow at all.

Around then there was skunks works a couple of buildings away from me. On the spectrum analyzer I could see spread spectrum signals showing up at 900 and 2.4GHZ.

Edit: Stay classy HN.

> I'm lost as to why the author wants to work so hard to dismiss these technologies

Some people just want to find negativity in the world.

To me it reads as bitterness about the uptake of his personal project, which he would presumably class with the cool tech from before '96. Some of the copy on that project's page has a similar feel to this blog post:

http://www.subtext-lang.org/

"This approach antagonizes both academics and professionals, but it is what I must do."

> Some people just want to find negativity in the world

Are you kidding? The author has (clearly) been dedicating his entire career to trying to solve these problems. He's not some drive-by hipster reminiscing about the good old days. The problem is that in a lot of ways programming is stuck in the "good old days"

I'm going to take a wiiiiild guess here that the author's personal peak was around 1996.

It's just a reaction to 'the kids' coming after him not being up to how good he (mis) remembers the past.

This negativity is a disappointing and growing trend among some grumpy old men in our field as that generation approach retirement. It disrespects people working today and I don't like it.

>This negativity is a disappointing and growing trend among some grumpy old men in our field as that generation approach retirement. It disrespects people working today and I don't like it.

Your contributions thus far in this thread have been negative with no substantive rebuttal to any points made in the article.

The key logical disconnect here is

> All of these latter technologies are useful incremental improvements on top of the foundational technologies that came before.

As if that wasn’t the case before. We’ve always built on what came before. What on earth does the author think was so revolutionary about Java? The language was an evolution of the C family. The VM was an evolution of Strongtalk.

The negative person says ‘all done before.’ The reasonable person says ‘step forward’ as we’ve been doing ever since.

And what’s the implication? That people have become stupid or lazy or ignorant? This is an attack on the work and integrity of a generation of people.

There is a consistent claim at the moment from CS men of a certain age that we don’t appreciate their genius enough. They bang on about how under appreciated their ideas are at their invited talks and on Twitter. I don’t think I’m the only one in the community thinking this. I think quite a lot of people feel this.

It’s not negative to call out someone else’s negativity.

>It’s not negative to call out someone else’s negativity.

That's not what I was referring to. I was referring to the actual negative statements you made about the author:

>Some people just want to find negativity in the world.

>I'm going to take a wiiiiild guess here that the author's personal peak was around 1996.

>It's just a reaction to 'the kids' coming after him not being up to how good he (mis) remembers the past.

>This negativity is a disappointing and growing trend among some grumpy old men in our field as that generation approach retirement.

That's not "calling out" negativity. That's a list of snark, broad insult, and generalizations with no supporting information. It's rude, discriminatory, and serves only to diminish the overall quality of discussion.

I don’t know what to tell you apart from

> Since 1996 almost everything has been cleverly repackaging and re-engineering prior inventions

seems like an ignorant attack on thousands of people’s professional competence and a veiled insinuation of deceit (the ‘clever repackaging and re-engineering’) and

> Suddenly, for the first time ever, programmers could get rich quick

sounds like a moral attack. All in all it’s a shitty thing to say to people. And there’s more and more grumpy people trying to tell young computer science researchers today that they’re useless and have no new ideas like this.

Have you been to a CS conference recently? You may be missing the context that these people are everywhere criticising everyone for not being as innovative as they remember they were.

It’s damaging and not true either. No thanks!

The great inventions do not look to be incremental because they are presented that way. Personally I find it fascinating to burst that bubble by looking into the rare histories of what lead up to what are considered the great tentpole developments.

I really think everything is incremental in progress. Where things are closer to us, we can see the incremental steps. Where we think of the great things of the past, we are completely ignorant of the incremental steps that came before.

Realistically yes, but as a kid promised flying cars and off-world colonies it's less impressive. Blade Runner is now set in the past shrug. These are mostly hardware I suppose.

Instead we got social networking, ad tech, and surveillance capitalism.

Meh, people always bring up the "flying cars" bit but I'm going to call bullshit that these were ever really feasible, not from a tech perspective but from an economic, energy and safety perspective.

The tech for flying cars already exists, just not the tech for protecting people on the ground from flying car crashes.

Author failed to mention the ML ecosystem, which has made significant improvements to products used by real people every day. A number of items on their cool/before 1996 list seem to serve little practical purpose. Which is cool, but it does lead to the question of by what metric we're judging a technology's importance.

I would consider the advances in ML to be mainly mathematical and hardware rather than software. Being able to write the libraries to support ML operations wouldn't have been a problem in 1996 if the hardware & theory had existed.

What software do we have the theory, hardware, and use for, which hasn't been written? I guess I'm struggling to identify a useful delineation between these categories.

I totally agree with you. But, just as an anecdote on the other side, I recently did some Blender tutorials, the famous donut scene by Andrew Price. When I was done I was happy I learned Blender better but I was also disappointed that making 3D hasn't changed much since 1995. In 1995 I learned PowerAnimator (predecessor to Maya) and in 1996 I learned 3DSMax. The techniques used to build the scenes are exactly the same, still super tedious. What changed is better renderers, sculpting (z-brush), but not much else.

They are nothing new. Just re-iterations and refinements. Incremental innovation is no real innovation. True innovation is destructive, removes whole fields from the map, while creating new ones. I don't like being called a coward, even if the words wrapped in velvet, but in this case the truth sticks.

PS: Machine learning is old too, although application - again due to incremental hardware improvement, has finally arrived.

Devil's advocate here but I sort of agree. I think that all of the hard problems with computers will continue to be hard problems until some groundbreaking new computing is discovered (quantum?). All of these technologies are mere transformations with the same hard problems with computing still present underneath.

A lot of these are also fads that will pass. Are there any problems today that were unsolvable in 1980 given enough time?

Wow, smaller transistors, more clock cycles, big whoop. We have more now but it's not fundamentally different is it?

>If an engineer in 1996 fell into a coma and woke up today, they'd be greeted with an entirely different world.

I'd also be disappointed. Oh we are on DDR4, Windows 10, multiple cores, cpp 20? Ok. So we basically just extended the trendline 25 years. Boring.

Yeah, lots of progress being made left and right: huge improvements in image processing and recognition, SLAM in every cleaning robot (and we have cleaning robots!), much improved machine translation, much better voice recognition and transcription, ubiquitous video conferencing software, super complex virtual worlds accessible to anyone and also most of what was desktop only now also available on mobile devices, which was far from a small task to achieve.

What's so impressive about V8? that billions of dollars have being pour into it to make it fast? for a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place?

My guess is that the author is comparing the rate of change from 1971-1996 to 1996-2021 (25 years each), but didn't do a good job with explaining that.

In which case software has "stalled" in terms of "invent anything fundamentally new " - and I'd agree.

In the grand scheme of things, there is nothing impressive about V8 - it’s just a really good interpreter. Every technology we have today could be easily programmed in pre-1996 languages, they haven’t unlocked anything not possible before. We even use the exact same tooling. That is the stagnation.