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0 pointsjosteink6y ago0 comments

> and most if not all of your existing hardware and software would continue to work unchanged

It’s funny how backwards compatibility back then allowed us to have massive progress, by making gradual steps forward possible.

These days, where we are seeing less and less real progress, we now hear many programmers claiming we have to sacrifice and shed backwards compatibility if we want further progress. (I’m looking at you Apple and Google!)

Something is very very backwards. And yes, an upgrade may no longer be an actual upgrade.

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ben77996y ago

I think this is partly because things have gotten vastly more complex & abstract, and none of that complexity and abstraction has been managed well. We basically always say "Yes right away" to increased complexity/abstraction these days when PM wants something.

Tech debt was lower back then.. maybe all of our practices were worse, but the code bases were thousands of times smaller which made up for a lot.

Heck Agile hadn't been invented yet back then. You got requirements and got to design the core technology first. There was no such thing as an MVP hack and all of a sudden you had a back end that had millions of lines of code and 10 layers of abstraction that was all built on a bad design.

bunderbunder6y ago

It's an industry-wide Duke Nukem Forever situation.

If you keep re-laying your foundation, then you're also going to have to keep re-building whatever was built on top of it, and that's just a huge time suck.

We have accomplished the ideal of "wei wu wei" to an exquisite degree, but, unfortunately, we got our wei and our wei mixed up.

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