alt Hacker NewsIn the grand scheme of things it wouldn’t actually be that strange: generations and generations of humans were mostly farmers and mostly did the same thing as their parents. Of course technology developed but lots of people did the same job with the same methods their whole lives.
But everybody on this site lived through the first half of a logistic curve so that perspective seems strange to us.
Peter Thiel talks about the difference in progress between bits and atoms. Progress in atoms (physical things) moves incredibly slowly, and has done for centuries. Progress in bits (software) moves astonishingly fast. We all work in software. We should not expect things to remain the same for very long because change is easy.
I think it'd be pretty incredible if we hit on the best way to write software 40 years ago when people had only been doing it seriously for a couple of decades. It's no more surprising that we find better approaches to coding than farming improving when the tractor replaced a horse.