The OP didn't have much leg to really stand on for this point and glosses over any of the actual difficult work that would need to be done to make this utopia from the 70/80/90s materialize.
It's not a great post, and its ideas are not that clearly worked out. He could seriously work on his tone.
It could be parsed minimally as a just a grumpy rant with a bit of "get off the lawn" and a few wrong ideas.
Mostly a waste of time.
I'm steelmanning it because personally I'd prefer to get as much as possible from what I've read. Even if it wasn't necessarily put it in the first place (maximizing my utility from it, for my purposes). I'm not debating the OP.
If you're acting from a position of keeping him honest. Kudos.
So I don't really need to engage you on the point then.
I'm agreeing that you'd probably be able to take down the OP in an argument. Or at least would force him to up his game considerable to be able to actually make his points clearly.
BTW, I really like your use of "steelmanning" here.
Actually looking at his other points after this exchange:
(2) I think modern VMs have amazing engineering - is he asking for hacks? Or what?
(3) Cloud offerings could be more coherent. But there are real market and organisational constraints.
(4) Drag and drop UI designers would be nice, and I miss them, but even the good ones used to produce terrible code when used innocently.
(5) I think modern compilers are pretty awesome. Not sure what he wants done.
(6) Yeah. We could build better more compact systems.
His unhappiness at the state of the world.
Hmm. Moaning about it like that doesn't really do much to solve it...
The OP didn't have much leg to really stand on for this point and glosses over any of the actual difficult work that would need to be done to make this utopia from the 70/80/90s materialize.
It's not a great post, and its ideas are not that clearly worked out. He could seriously work on his tone.
It could be parsed minimally as a just a grumpy rant with a bit of "get off the lawn" and a few wrong ideas.
Mostly a waste of time.
I'm steelmanning it because personally I'd prefer to get as much as possible from what I've read. Even if it wasn't necessarily put it in the first place (maximizing my utility from it, for my purposes). I'm not debating the OP.
If you're acting from a position of keeping him honest. Kudos.
So I don't really need to engage you on the point then.
I'm agreeing that you'd probably be able to take down the OP in an argument. Or at least would force him to up his game considerable to be able to actually make his points clearly.
BTW, I really like your use of "steelmanning" here.
Actually looking at his other points after this exchange:
(2) I think modern VMs have amazing engineering - is he asking for hacks? Or what?
(3) Cloud offerings could be more coherent. But there are real market and organisational constraints.
(4) Drag and drop UI designers would be nice, and I miss them, but even the good ones used to produce terrible code when used innocently.
(5) I think modern compilers are pretty awesome. Not sure what he wants done.
(6) Yeah. We could build better more compact systems.
His unhappiness at the state of the world.
Hmm. Moaning about it like that doesn't really do much to solve it...