[mibbit]

> There has been tremendous progress in both frameworks and languages over the last decade. If you can't see that then, well, I don't really know what else to say, other than to perhaps get off your lawn.

If that's true, can programmers today do things they couldn't do 10 years ago? Can they program faster than they could 10 years ago due to all these innovations in languages and frameworks? I'd say no on both counts.

[saturn]

> I'd say no on both counts.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion I suppose, but I don't know any professional programmer who would even come close to agreeing with you.

[pointyhat]

What about me? :) I agree with him.

So you're suggesting that the time to market of an ASP.Net MVC, NHibernate, Autofac, Razor, SQL Server application is going to be lower than a classic asp and SQL server application?

[saturn]

I thought you were a sockpuppet ..

I wouldn't know anything about the stack you describe. Seems to me the barriers there are all Enterprise related; framework innovation isn't the bottleneck. Big business software - perhaps that's something that hasn't improved much, if at all.

But this is a startups related site, in case you hadn't noticed. Web programmer here. Web frameworks have improved immeasurably. If you tried to tell a web programmer that nothing has improved since 2001 you would just be laughed at, and rightly so.

It's not just about the web though. Look at the new functional languages. Look at the message queues, the image libraries, computer vision, sound .. bloody everything. Tell me, is h264 better than mpg videos from 2001?

Step outside your bubble man. In fact, leave your bubble, it sounds pretty depressing in there. This is a very exciting time to be a programmer.

[pointyhat]

Hardly. I like it here.

And as for startups, I worked for one once. It's a big business now.

I build software which happens to reside on the web, not "web sites" or "web applications". Sometimes we have desktop applications deployed because they require real-time data. Sometimes we integrate with massive systems with millions of users. We don't use functional languages (they do not suit our workload and don't scale to our recruitment requirements), we use message queues (NServiceBus, zeromq), we use image libraries (GDI, reportlab), we use all the funky nosql stuff (Mongo), we use ORMs (NHibernate), we don't use computer vision or sound because we don't need it in our space.

Big, exciting things happen where I am.

It's the bubble you are in that I'd hate to be in. The superficial one which appears to be based on pushing social crap, novelty iPhone applications and glorified todo lists on the world.

My problem is that we did ALL OF THIS in 2001. The process hasn't changed, but the tools have and the time to market is the same.