<i>The programmer and the program have never been further away from each other as it is today.</i><p>Yet at the same time there hasn&#x27;t ever been so much working software produced, or so many working programmers, so something <i>is</i> working. The barrier to entry to writing code has been lowered. That&#x27;s a good thing. We have more people trying out their ideas now because it&#x27;s <i>easy</i> to get something working. You can&#x27;t reasonably ignore that with a hand-wavy &quot;it could be so much better&quot; lament.<p>That isn&#x27;t to suggest for a second that things couldn&#x27;t be even better. I just think it&#x27;s important to understand that getting lots of people involved in development, <i>even if what they produce is awful</i>, has benefits for society. That might be more important than good code.