On Mon, 4 Jan 2021 09:57:15 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'" ...But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996."'
What’s that, Lassie? Somebody is making a circular argument? There would have been people, back in 1996, who argued that “progress in software technology itself” had stalled much earlier. Like say, back in the 1960s. Because everything since then has been some kind of development or rehash of ideas that were first proposed back then.
In 1996 there were "LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, Oracle, Smalltalk, Windows, C++, LabView, HyperCard, Mathematica, Haskell, WWW, Python, Mosaic, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Flash, Postgress [sic]". After that we're supposed to have achieved "IntelliJ, Eclipse, ASP, Spring, Rails, Scala, AWS, Clojure, Heroku, V8, Go, React, Docker, Kubernetes, Wasm".
Some of those were groundbreaking, others were not. This wasn’t always obvious at the time. Certain ideas represented an advance, but also an obstacle to further advancement (e.g. Basic, Flash). Others did not seem so important at the time (e.g. Python, Linux, GNU), but turned out to be quite pivotal in retrospect. Historians will tell you: it’s always hard to judge the importance of what’s happening right now--you have to wait until “now” becomes “then”. And we all know the “good old days” effect, that things seemed somehow better, more real, larger than life back then, when we were younger. My guess is, this guy is just about in middle age right now.