[glenstein]

>Things never change, the old generation fights the new one and calls it stupid.

I was with you until here, which I think is the wrong take. That is, this gets it exactly backwards. It's not just that every generation gets upset at the previous generation so let's all shrug and move on, it's that this is really a thing that is unfolding from one generation to the next.

It seems like the reflex of oh well the previous generation said it so let's ignore it comes up a lot, to the point that I have this go to example that I use every time it does. I'm a baseball fan. And one thing you used to hear in the '80s, with a guy like, say, Rob Deer or Steve Balboni, was that they tried too hard to hit home runs and they struck out too much. Then you heard that in the '90s as well. Then you heard that in the 2000s, especially with money ball and guys like Jack Cust. Then it just kept getting even more extreme with guys Carlos Pena and now Joey Gallo.

So one thing you could say is, well, every generation says that there were less strikeouts in third day. But there's actually data on this and..... it's true! Almost every decade, from the 1800s through every decade of the 1900s through now, strikeouts really have been going up year to year. And so that intergenerational commentary, well, it's describing a real thing that really is happening.

The same can be said of other things, like people saying they always used to remember the environment being better. Or people saying attention spans are getting shorter. But, they are.

The instinct here I think is to dismiss these since every generation says it. But I think the conclusion should be opposite, that these are real things unfolding on a multi-generational level. So if you see it happening with software, maybe that's because there's really something to it.

[scotty79]

There is real thing happening. But the dissatisfaction from that thing happening is what's the criticism is all about. And those are two separate things. Things changing might be real or not. But the dissatisfaction of older generation is constant for thousands of years.

[glenstein]

>But the dissatisfaction from that thing happening is what's the criticism is all about.

The argument seems to imply that the dissatisfaction would be there regardless of the circumstances. But the point I'm making is that the dissatisfaction can be understood as meaningful and not as just a generalized disposition that's a natural consequence of getting old.

And whether or not I'm right on that, the devil is in the details there, and it's going to depend on a case-by-case basis. But it won't do just to say well the older generation is going to complain no matter what, because that doesn't credit them with the possibility of complaining for a legitimate reason.

[funcDropShadow]

> But the dissatisfaction of older generation is constant for thousands of years.

And there is no dissatisfaction of the younger generation? There is no, this is the old way let's do it differently because we are more clever by the young generation?

[scotty79]

There is. But it's the other side of this interdenominational coin. Basically both generations in conflict think the other is stupid.

[dist-epoch]

You are focusing on the generational trends, I was focusing on the individual.

Tell a kid learning to program today "you should program in assembly because it's efficient, like I did back in my days".

Kid looks around and sees it would take him 3 days to implement a hello world in assembly, but only 3 seconds to do it in Python. He has a 16 core computer with 64 GB of RAM. Both hello worlds run instantly. So how does that advice make sense? Kid calls you a crazy old man out of touch with the times. Kid goes on running locally a 50 GB LLM to make it do a hello world and feels very excited about the future of programming.

[glenstein]

I'm not sure I would agree that the point I'm making cleanly transposes onto the details that you've selected.

For one, I think the accepted premise in this conversation up till now was that there is a real issue with software bloat. And you've switched that detail out for a different one where we assume no discernible bloat or difference in performance as time passes.

I also don't think that I understand what's going on in the pivot from generational examples to individual ones. I feel like at least the comment I replied to was pretty clearly about generational trends. But on another level I think that the upshot is the same regardless of whether your surveying that disagreement at a general level versus its equivalent manifestation at an individual level.

I think the upshot would be the same in each case as long as you keep all the details the same, and I think somewhere in the transposition from the general to the individual and agreed assumption about bloat and underperformance of software, as well as some implications about what that means about prevailing assumptions and practices surrounding software development, got lost in the translation from one to the other.

[eropple]

> So one thing you could say is, well, every generation says that there were less strikeouts in third day. But there's actually data on this and..... it's true! Almost every decade, from the 1800s through every decade of the 1900s through now, strikeouts really have been going up year to year. And so that intergenerational commentary, well, it's describing a real thing that really is happening.

I agree with the factual observations in your post, but there's an additional bit here, and that there's qualitative value being assigned to what The Youths don't mind and The Olds protest. In baseball, the guys who strike out a lot but hit a ton of home runs create more runs, and therefore create more wins, than most base-hit machines (obvious outliers exist, but you get the idea). On my computer, VS Code does more things that benefit me than vim does (and the outlier here, I guess, would be "a lovingly crafted vim monstrosity that uses all the LSPs etc. designed for VS Code et al in the first place"--doable but not the happy path, etc.).

There's also (and IMO this is more in code than baseball) some kind of bizarre moral valence assigned, and that I don't even pretend to understand, but that's a different story.

[glenstein]

>I agree with the factual observations in your post, but there's an additional bit here, and that there's qualitative value being assigned to what The Youths don't mind and The Olds protest.

A few things here. I want the main center of gravity in the point that I'm making to be a way of approaching intergenerational reports of a given phenomenon, namely that they shouldn't just be dismissed as a function of old age or a function of changing perspective. After that point, pretty much any point you want to make is fair game as far as I'm concerned. In the case of baseball, there are positives and negatives. It clearly seems to be a positive trade-off for hitters who are choosing which style to take. I suppose there's another consideration at a higher level as to whether it benefits the game itself. So that can go either way in my opinion depending on what's important.

I tried at the end to throw in some other examples, shortening of attention spans, and environmental degradation. I think in those cases it's clear that there's something negative going on. But in general we don't have to agree with the value judgment if it's negative, but I think the positive or negative value judgments is an independent thing from the phenomenon of multiple generations attesting to some thing happening.