I hope not. We need more structured approaches, I personally vote with all hands the amount of "play" we do to be drastically reduced, enforced by revoking a professional license even (if our industry ever gets regulated).
I am sick or nerds reinventing wheels because they are privileged and bored. Like I ranted recently here in HN, can we stop with the millionth LISP interpreter already? We have people dying in hospitals because the software of the heart monitor glitched or misread a sensor. Can we get on those problems instead? Like, before the 41th century for example? When will we get to do something genuinely useful that actually, [gasps], helps people?
[takes a deep breath]
First order of business: rework our interaction with the OS the command line, stop all the legacy lunacy of TTY and many others, and figure out one way of doing things. Do it on Linux. If Windows and macOS don't want to play along then too bad, the devs working there will have a miserable time, and that will introduce pressure from them to Microsoft and Apple to play ball.
Let's go. No more nerds. Let's be correctness + simplicity fanatics, I say.
> I hope that this industry turns it around
It will never do that. Let's not forget we are workers paid to produce value. Let's also not forget that IT is always viewed as an undesired cost center -- I hate it as much as every programmer but it's how people view us and curiously enough, that perception is very persistent.
Many people understood we need to "play" to gain more knowledge but these times are mostly over, at least in popular development categories like web and mobile. Most people there -- myself included -- are paid to assemble IKEA furniture, at least 90% of the time. Creative tasks are few and far between, sadly.
> The paragraphs about git were interesting, in the sense that the author themselves suffer from the industry's "I'm right and you're wrong" motto that is the reason, by the looks, that they've left. There is some unresolved conflict there.
As a guy who started 20+ years ago -- like you alluded to these times being more lax (which I haven't observed but then again I never lived in the USA) -- I stand with OP here; appealing to popularity and cult of personalities are sins I didn't imagine the programming area will suffer from, yet it happens every day. Try criticizing one of Python's many obvious pitfalls (no, I will not elaborate, they have been described a million times, including here on HN) and you'll be buried under a mountain of "millions are using it successfully every day, have you considered that you are the problem?". As if the amount of supporters of a thing ever had any correlation at all with quality but hey, don't tell them that (tidbit: burning the "witches" in the middle ages; I bet 99% of the time somebody had a beef with the neighbor lady and they set her up as a "witch" to get rid of her).
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I share your nostalgia about how things were done long ago but I really hope we emerge more disciplined, structured, and much less bikeshedd-y out of the whole thing.
Play on your own time, not during work.