[baldfat]

> A lot of young people think that the people who wrote software 30 years ago were just plain stupid and all wrote crappy code.

The generation from the 70s and 80s will forever be the best technological generation the world will ever see. We had serious constraints that would need elegant solutions. I remember as a kid looking at Z80 maunals to learn how to save a few bytes so that code would run, or the 680k Microsoft limit that caused the code to be very concise and every bit was thoughtfully used.

Now that the sky is the limit we have cookie cutter solutions built on other pieces that "work" which really are just rewritten code in some new language or framework. This is now the new norm and it will never change.

[zbentley]

> We had serious constraints that would need elegant solutions.

In the era of abundant hardware resources, I like to think that this sense of craftsmanship hasn't been abandoned, but rather transmuted--transmuted into the ability to make things as readable, accessible, and maintainable as possible.

The Redis, Phantom (Thrift proxy), Kafka, and PostgreSQL codebases are regularly things I consult as role models in the design of clean, pragmatic code.

The explosion of technologies since the elegance-by-necessity-of-optimization era does not necessarily mean that the capability of engineers has declined.

[bitexploder]

As a generation yes. But, I got started in 93/94, learned C. Got into infosec and reversing and can do machine code reasonably well these days. Plenty of my peers learned assembly on TI calculators and other places. By the numbers there are probably more competent low level systems engineers then there were in the 70s and 80s. As a ratio of programming professionals we are dwarfed by PHP programmers, etc.

[majkinetor]

> We had serious constraints that would need elegant solutions

I don't think those are comparable to complexities in IT that exist today.

[dragonwriter]

> I don't think those are comparable to complexities in IT that exist today.

I think the constraints and lack of “here you go” resources many starting programmers dealt with, even for toy applications, out of necessity in the 70s and 80s are better preparation for the attitude necessary for dealing with the complexities in IT today than the learning conditions today.

Which isn't to idealize it, it was also a hard onramp that drove lots of people off that would have done well at many real world problems where they weren't soloing without support, and night with experience have still developed to great solo practitioners, too. But the people I've encountered that came through that 70s/80s start tend to be, IME, on average more willing to slog through and learn hard stuff in new areas than people who came up through, later, easier onramps.

Though that may also be in significant part survivorship bias, as the 70s/80s crew will have had to have stuck around the field longer, usually, and it may be people with that flexibility are more likely to stay in technology past the half-life of whatever was current when they got in.

[driverdan]

In business the goal of software is to make money. Elegant solutions do not necessary increase the bottom line. Increasing productivity at the cost of elegance is a net win in most cases.

[flukus]

And yet I've seen plenty of business spend a huge amount of time and effort on "enterprise" abominations to attempt to build elegant extensible systems. I've seen at least a dozen instances of cron businesses re-invented. I've seen business throw money down bottomless holes on proprietary databases. There's a well known tech company that now owns two bloated electron based cross platform text editors, neither ever had the goal of making money, at least directly.

Business is great at wasting money on software, I just wish they'd waste it in a way that benefited people.