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Is software getting worse?
(blog.ploeh.dk)
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Yes. At least since late '90s, and certainly the last 2 decades.
I blame the rise of frameworks, libraries, and IDEs. It's easier for someone who knows nothing to throw some software together and ship it. In the good old days, all software had to be written by someone who knew what they were doing, often in difficult tools. You had to think ahead and write code correctly, because you couldn't just ship patches every week.
And as junior devs get replaced by AI, there won't be any experience for any of them to learn how to do that.
I very much disagree with this. Yes to an extent you don't need to know as much as you might have in the past but if we had to constantly reinvent the wheel, I don't think we would have nearly as many people entering/remaining in this field. Additionally well written frameworks and libraries can actually make your code safer since you don't have to reinvent the wheel and discover the pitfalls all over again. IDEs are also a net positive IMO. Errors next to the line of code that caused them, breakpoints, interactive debugging. These are all things I personally would find hard to live without. Necessities? Technically no. But good god do I not want to have to read build output unless necessary.
A good IDE also helps you make better refactoring, making the code so much easier to read. The main goal of any code.