Has the quality of the average programmer dropped? I look at the state of software I use in my day-to-day, in computers 100,000x more powerful than the computers which ran Win3.1...
I'd say so. Up until the Visual Basic era that was accessible even for literal children (like me), you'd need deep C/C++/ASM knowledge to churn out a program that was reasonably performant, and the rise of the Web+JavaScript expanded accessibility even more as you didn't need an expensive IDE+compiler.
The result of programming getting more accessible obviously leads to a decrease in average quality/skill.
The computers are 100,000x more powerful and electron apps can bring multi core systems with 16GB of memory to their knees.
Coming from a 25MHz 486SX with 1MB of RAM to now, it’s disheartening that as a profession we’ve prioritized developer convenience over user experience. That system ran Netscape, Word, Paint Shop Pro, Doom, could play video, music (wav, midi, CD), and more.
Looking at today's mainstream software it feels that management agenda (pushing unneeded product X by disrupting user experience) and advertisement are also strongly prioritized over user experience.
>Has the quality of the average programmer dropped?
Yes and no. An average programmer today does not know nor care about size, speed, compatibility, portability, IRQ interrupts.. we needed to know how to manage all the things. However, back then there were no security bugs other than bypassing passwords and copy protection.
