Ask HN: Has software changed much in the last 5 yrs?
I hear the saying “5 yrs and your knowledge becomes stale”.
6 yrs into my eng career, that really doesn’t seem to be the case.
Maybe this means we’re due for some new thing??? Or not…
6 yrs into my eng career, that really doesn’t seem to be the case.
Maybe this means we’re due for some new thing??? Or not…
Just as an example, here are the top 10 languages on GitHub in 2020, according to https://octoverse.github.com/, along with the years they were introduced:
JavaScript 1995
Python 1991
Java 1995
TypeScript 2012
C# 2000
PHP 1995
C++ 1985
C 1972
Shell 1971
Ruby 1995
Something like React is the norm now. It's not necessarily any simpler or faster, but it's more efficient past N hours, which is the case for many larger companies.
It's also why functional programming has regained popularity, or at least writing functions the way you would for functional (immutable, output of one is the input of another).
However, we're still using a lot of old techniques. The best book on Design Patterns was written in 1997. Pragmatic Programmer was written in 1999 (though revisited a few years ago). The best TDD book is still from 2002; a lot of modern takes on TDD gets the philosophy completely wrong. TDD was meant to reduce fear, not improve test coverage.
What impact have these languages had on the industry? Small impact so far but it is early days.
Anecdotal observation: Julia seems to be gaining greater traction that Nim and Crystal. However, although Julia is a general-purpose programming language, the close association with scientific computing may see it pigeonholed by some developers as suitable only for that domain.
It's refreshing that all three languages count performance as a key feature. Together with Rust and Go, this has had some impact in making developers aware of the importance of performance in programming, and the advantage these languages have over less-performant languages.
Aliens live under the ice on under a moon somewhere and they have their Alan Turing who proved they can’t solve the halting problem.
Another aspect of it is random and ephemeral; how you use ‘extern’ in both the .h and the .c file, the use of base 2 exponents in floating point numbers despite writing them in base 10 (e.g. ‘0.2’ doesn’t exist in your computer)
Mistakes like that last a long time, and new and better things face an uphill battle.
Thus is it always changing but stays mostly the same.