Gotta disagree. Adding abstraction has yielded benefits but it certainly hasn't been consistently good. For example, see the modern web.
- Natural language is not precise and has no spec, unlike programming languages.
- The translation from C (or other higher-level language) to assembly by a given compiler is determined in a way that the behavior of an LLM is not.
- On the flip side, the amount of control given to the tool versus what is specified by the programmer is wildly different between the two.
This is what you have seen with the rise with some of the worst technologies (Javascript) being used in places where it shouldn't because some engineers want to keep using one language for everything.
Which is where you have basic desktop apps written using electron taking up 500MB each and use 1.2GB of memory. It doesn't scale well on a typical 8GB laptop on a user machine.
Not saying it should be in assembly either (which also doesn't make sense), but the fact that today's excuse is that a SWE is used to one language is really a poor excuse.
Nothing wrong with using high-level compiled languages to write native desktop apps that compile to an executable.
NodeJS was the biggest mistake our industry made and I will die on this hill. It has taken the crown from null. People have been trying to claw it back with Typescript but the real solution was to drop JS altogether. JS becoming the language in the browser was an artifact of history when we didnt know where this internet thing was going. By the time NodeJS was invented we should have known better.
Back before I got a cell phone, I had many many phone numbers memorized. Once I got a cell phone with a contacts list, I just stopped. Now I have my parents and my wife's phone numbers memorized, and that's it.
URLs are much the same. On most websites, if I can see the domain is the one that I expect to be on, that's all I really care about. There's a few pages that I interact with the URL directly, but it's a minority.