Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
As a beginning programmer, this is extremely discouraging and makes me want to do something else with my time.
Instead of punching down at those who are clearly undertrained, you should elevate those around you. Being a dick about it doesn't seem like a good use of your time.
What does this have to do with being a beginner programmer and punching down? The meme is about how we do programming in general today vs the way it was done before.
I get what this is saying but on the other hand...
Programmers now:
💪 Can spin up a minimum viable product in a day
💪 Writes web applications that handle millions or even billions of requests per second
💪 Remote code execution and memory related vulnerabilities are rarer than ever now
💪 Can send data across the world with sub 1 second latency
💪 The same PCIe interface is now 32x faster (16x PICe 1 was 8GB/s, while PCIe 6 is 256GB/s)
💪 The same wireless bands now have more throughput due to better radio protocols and signal processing
💪 Writes applications that scale across the over 100 cores of modern top of the line processors
💪 JIT and garbage collection techniques have improved to the point where they have a nearly imperceptible performance impact in the majority of use cases
💪 Most bugs are caught by static analysis and testing frameworks before release
💪 Codebases are worked on by thousands of people at the same time
💪 Functional programming, which is arguably far less bug prone, is rapidly gaining traction as a paradigm
💪 Far more emphasis on immutability to the point where many languages have it as the default
💪 Virtual machines can be seamlessly transferred from one computer to another while they're running
💪 Modern applications can be used by people anywhere in the world regardless of language, even things that were very difficult to do in the past like mirroring the entire interface to allow an application that was written for left to right languages to support right to left
💪 Accessibility features allow people who are blind, paralyzed, or have other disabilities to use computers just as well as anyone else
Just wanted to provide come counter examples because I'm not a huge fan of the "programmers are worse than they were back in the 80s" rethoric. While programmers today are more reliant on automated tools, I really disagree that programmers are less capable in general than they were in the past.
For sure, it's a lot easier to do a lot of stuff today than before, but the way we build software has become incredibly wasteful as well. Also worth noting that some of the workflows that were available in languages like CL or Smalltalk back in the 80s are superior to what most languages offer today. It hasn't been strictly progress in every regard.
I'd say the issue isn't that programmers are worse today, but that the trends in the industry select for things that work just well enough, and that's how we end up with stuff like Electron.
Programmers of the past didn't have to work 2 jobs to be able to buy a house and live comfortably, less alone spend most of their paycheck on inflated prices for gas, food, services, etc. But hey we got AI and Amazon Prime now.
Not to mention the sense of pioneering something. Like I imagine calculating the Moon landing is something you're happy to spend 80+ hours a week on, especially when basic needs are taken care of.