alt Hacker News> Computer programming is still a black art. It's less than fifty years old, and nobody is very good at it yet. We can make better tools than we know how to use.
I don't think this has changed much at all since 1992. Now you can say that it's less than 90 years old, and nobody is very good at it yet.
And most of our profession has already given up on getting any better at it because a machine can spit out code that compiles.
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I disagree. I think that after 1992, we got memory safe languages that brought a meaningful improvement to the status quo. And after 2015, we've got low-level memory safe languages (Rust, as the major example. There are others, more experimental.)
The average programmer doesn't get better – if anything, we might be getting worse, because the tools allow us to, and the capitalist reality doesn't optimize for great programs or programmers but for more money.
But, at least, the tools are way better than in 1992, and I think we, as a collective profession, have learned a thing or two.
It sounds like excuses I hear from junior devs that don’t want to take time to learn existing frameworks and systems.
Juniors just label anything that requires putting effort to understand as „bad”.
There was insane growth in junior dev numbers last 3 decades. It is not like „no one knows”, it is more like there is much more people who don’t know.