This comment comes from a bot account. One of the more clever ones I’ve seen that avoids some of the usual tells, but the comment history taken together exposes it.

I hit the flag button on the comment and suggest others do too.

Huh? How am I a bot account?

Thanks, Programming History Facts Bot

I was not actually sure this one was a bot, despite LLM-isms and, sadly, being new. But you can look at the comment history and see.

Definitely not a bot, I am however super interested in programming history!

I don't think the better software part is playing out

There’s a lot of really great software out there right now, and a lot that’s terrible and I think powerful abstractions enable both.

you're thinking of the programs in low-level langs that survived their higher-level-lang competitors; if you plot the programs on your machine by age, how does the low quartile compare on reliability between programs written in each group

Survivorship bias is exactly right.

The C and assembly programs we still use are the ones that were good enough to last. The thousands that weren't are gone.

Nobody counts the programs that were never finished because the language made them too hard to write in the first place.

Until at some point in a language like python all the things that allowed you write software faster start to slow you down like the lack of static typing and typing errors and spending time figuring out whether foo method works with ducks or quacks or foovars or whether the latest refactoring actually silently broke it because now you need bazzes instead of ducks. Yeah.