The Great Software Stagnation
The author sets up a short list of technologies developed since 1996:<p>> Since 1996 we’ve gotten: IntelliJ, Eclipse, ASP, Spring, Rails, Scala, AWS, Clojure, Heroku, V8, Go, React, Docker, Kubernetes, Wasm.<p>And then waives them all away as incremental or unimpressive.<p>The author holds up V8 as an example of something that isn't fundamentally new, which is missing the entire point of developing a runtime for an <i>existing language</i>. Not to mention, V8 is an impressive achievement in itself.<p>I'm lost as to why the author wants to work so hard to dismiss these technologies while simultaneously suggesting that nothing else noteworthy has been developed in the past two decades.<p>If an engineer in 1996 fell into a coma and woke up today, they'd be greeted with an entirely different world. We're driving around in electric cars, carrying around cell phones that are orders of magnitude faster than desktop PCs from 1996, and communication technology has evolved to the point that many of us are seamlessly working from home.<p>Technology only looks stagnant when you're steeped in it every day of every year. Up close, it looks slow. Take a step back and it's amazing what we have at our disposal relative to 1996. Don't mistake cynicism for expertise or objectivity.