[andyburke]

Yeah, the author's take is myopic. What they call bloat, people from the 70s would call wondrous: ubiquitous networking with and without wires, beautiful graphical interfaces, encryption everywhere (and expanding), far more open systems than proprietary re-engineered ones, the list goes on and on.

[cdcfa78156ae5]

The author is Philip Greenspun, who in the 1980s worked with the people that created all of the things you listed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun

There is nothing myopic about his perspective.

[theoh]

It's fair to mention that he is well known, though in fact I'm one of the old guard that remembers when he had a higher profile.

But, as with a new Paul Graham essay, surely we can critique the blog post on its merits instead of falling back on an assessment based on some kind of appeal to authority/"expertise by association". Philip Greenspan doesn't need to be treated with kid gloves as if he was the pope.

John Ousterhout made comments that touch on some similar (though not identical) distinctions in programming practices. That was years ago, and he was then a much more credible figure in software than Greenspun. All the same, his essay was heavily criticised. That's what serious intellectual discussion should involve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ousterhout%27s_dichotomy

http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html