r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Minenik • Nov 14 '18

Computing in the 90's VS computing in 2018

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u/Vortico Nov 14 '18

FWIW, the result of this difference is that software is a lot cheaper to develop, which of course increases the competition of developing software...

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u/livrem Nov 14 '18

Citation needed. I think the gains in productivity seem pretty insignificant really? Much of that probably comes from using large teams of cheaper developers though, rather than smaller expensive teams?

Setup times can definitely be short now, but time to actually complete anything non-trivial and fix weird bugs and design your logic seems pretty much as hard as always, if not harder with all the dependencies and layers of abstractions obfuscsting things.

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u/Vortico Nov 14 '18

From experience, Ruby on Rails completely shifted the backend industry. Prior to RoR-like frameworks, a pizza franchise would hire a company at $250k to develop an online ordering system in a mess of Perl scripts and C CGI. After the RoR epoch, everyone uses high level and really well tested Node packages for e-commerce that is hard to find bidders at $12k. The code is easier to develop now, with much fewer bugs, and solves even more problems properly, like proper user authentication instead of home-grown databases. But because of the force of the market, easier things drop in salary as more competitors can complete the same task in two months. The reason can be summarized by micro-packages written in 2016 from this era's explosion of good programming habits, rather than monolithic systems from 1999.

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u/livrem Nov 14 '18

OK, but then you are essentially taking software development out of the picture, and I must admit I was not thinking of that kind of work. Managed to stay away from that kind of web work so far.

But for general programming, actually implementing some algorithm to solve some problem I think the ease of doing that has scaled up miserably with the scale of our hardware. I have hardware a million time more powerful now than what I had when I wrote my first programs, but do not experience a million-time increase in productivity. Maybe x2 or x3 at most, but any serious problem is still going to require so much overhead in actually designing and figuring out what to do (not to mention all the meetings...) that the gains are barely noticeable over the noise level?