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by fortylove
243 days ago
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<this comment doesn't really add anything, but thought I'd share anyways for whatever reason> I forgot the editor (maybe TextMate?) that was in vogue during the peak of the Ruby on Rails era, but there was such a feeling of magic to using what was a fairly basic editor that still had syntax highlighting. Was this feeling of magic purely because I was younger? Or perhaps we did peak in terms of the ergonomics of human-controlling-machine without too many aids? Fighter pilots used to fly with skill and instincts, but now are assisted by all sorts of high tech equipment that has removed much of the "flying skill" and replaced it with "equipment skill". It's not that fighter pilots are worse now. I'm sure they are better at achieving the outcomes desired, while commanding much more complex equipment. But the perhaps the art of flying is less emphasized. In the same way, perhaps the era of software engineering is changing too? |
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This is a case of "everything old is new again".
A lot of this is new to the open source world. Proprietary systems have had this for decades. In a lot of ways, the stuff we use for things like javascript are a huge step downwards from the tooling available for Java, C#, and Visual Basic.
Visual Studio is an absolutely incredible piece of software. Two decades ago, you could drag and drop GUIs. You could write callback functions on buttons and never see the any of the code around that. You could write entire programs this way.
Vibe coding has existed since visual basic for applications escaped from the deep dark depths were it was wrought. If we want to go back further, look at fourth generation languages–the unholy realm where SQL came from. ;)
What we are seeing is wider adoption of old ideas. That wider adoption may be sufficient to cause a new era of engineering.