Awesome quote at about 62 minutes: "...This is all getting boring right? The point of this is: invention is boring. Invention is not a great intellectual breakthrough. Invention is not exciting reconceptualization. It's doing all of these hard little things."
A bit sobering for us folks who think Haskell/Clojure/Insert-high-level-language-here is going to change the world. Not that these tools aren't valuable, as they increase productivity (which is kind of a big deal when good engineers cost $100k a year), but on the flip side, it was then as true then as it is true now that you just had to do the grunt work of experimenting with your product.
Although on the other hand you have to factor in the "General Purpose Technology", even within IT - some things are generally applicable and cause a great leap forward - things like Lotus 1-2-3, GUI/mouse, RDBMS, html/web, etc. (using older examples as the older a technological leap forward is, the more unambiguously you can identify it clearly as being a step change rather than an iterative improvement or of limited applicability). Of course in the same way all these are followed up by thousands of small iterative improvements and boring stuff to slowly creep utility forward while waiting for the next big leap.
A bit sobering for us folks who think Haskell/Clojure/Insert-high-level-language-here is going to change the world. Not that these tools aren't valuable, as they increase productivity (which is kind of a big deal when good engineers cost $100k a year), but on the flip side, it was then as true then as it is true now that you just had to do the grunt work of experimenting with your product.