[gregjor]

Exactly. Great comment.

Rob Pike (a few years older than me) didn't mention a few relevant facts. Those mainframes cost a small fortune, so their owners valued the computing resources. That pressure to control costs, along with the sometimes severe constraints of the hardware, forced programmers who cut their teeth in that era to avoid bloat and questionable features. For the first decade and half of my career I worked at companies that didn't have an "IT" or software development department -- I worked in business units like logistics or accounting, as part of those teams, rather than as a separate "resource." I knew what the business needed because I worked alongside the people who would use the code I worked on.

When I started freelancing about 15 years ago I ran into customer after customer who had got sold (or proposed) crazy over-complicated (and expensive) solutions. Very often it seemed like a shopping list of languages and tools of the day, put together with no regard for real business needs. I have listened to programmers bamboozle their bosses and customers with phrases like "performant" and "maintainable" and "best practices" that don't mean much and don't have objective ways to measure them. I don't usually ascribe that to malice or fraud, just an almost complete disconnect and lack of interest in the business and its needs.