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I whole-heartedly disagree that software engineering is getting worse. The languages, ecosystems, security, processes, etc. are pretty much all far better than they were 10 years ago. You really just have to ignore the loud individuals in the "web3" and JavaScript (JS has largely calmed down lately though) spaces.



I'm curious if you'd share examples. I think I'd sum up the last 10 years as the web and mobile ecosystems doing a mediocre job trying to catch up to where native apps were 20 years ago.

My overall development experience writing C++ 10 years ago was actually better than writing C# and Typescript now. The more interactive environments like Jupyter notebooks and browser dev tools are nice, but they're still not as featureful or as interactive as a good Lisp environment.

For consumer software we're nearly in the same place we were 25 years ago, except we took a round trip through the web, and now we're back to downloading native apps, which are more "secure" in some sense, but are funneling private data off to strangers, making it overall worse. And our hardware is 100x more powerful but our software is 1000x more bloated to make up for it. And the business model of consumer software now is to treat the user like an idiot and monetize them as much as possible.

Business software has some bright spots, like IAAS, SAAS, etc. but they're kinda just regurgitating ideas from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Security is a funny one because it's technically better, but overall worse because software that wouldn't be connected in the past now "has to" go online, opening it up to attack.

There is a lot of good, like the open source world, and Linux and FreeBSD gaining popularity, but even those have dark sides, like corporations exploiting them as a source of cheap or free labor.


I think there are aspects of it that are getting worse.

Is React better than using vanilla JS? Yes. I like not storing state in the DOM.

Is it worth the layers of abstraction, both mental and infrastructural? This is a difficult question to answer.




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