> We are coming to a point where software is developing so fast and the abstractions getting better that soon we will have more software written by a smaller number of people
Maybe i m in the wrong planet, because all the software i see in the past ~10 years is an overcomplicated unmaintainable slow mess that needs more and more people to keep it from imploding.
You obviously haven't used C++${CURRENT_YEAR}, React rand().rand().rand(), and (define-new-silo functional-p). They are so amazing, it's like the software writes itself. Too bad they are not compatible with each other, or we wouldn't even need programmers anymore, they are such an innovation.
I was working on 20 years old software with quite some technological debt and then on software doing fraction of the same thing for 4 years, written from scratch by today "methologies" (move fast, abstract is everything, so is framework, vm shipped, opensource integrated everywhere,...).
The "new" software has technological debt that far surpasses the old software - but this happened in 4 years, and the team surpasses size of the team for old software. I just cant see how it could survive 20 years. But it was written faster, on the other side, no one really knows its internals - however they brag - due to huge pile of code taken from open source projects. I predict that "death by thousand cuts" will occur spontanously.
Look no further than Docker, which is the tech equivalent of giving up on Earth and moving everyone to Mars because we've screwed up so bad. We transpile one version of JavaScript to another and our stack requires webpack now. Remember when the browser could just load JavaScript without half a dozen middlemen in the way? Back when you didn't have to compile one interpreted language to another, not even gaining a higher level language in the process.
It's rather laughable that software will solve the mess that software creates any time soon.
Docker is to deployment what an API is to development: Hide the complexity inside some barrier and present a cleaner interface. The complexity can be well-managed or not; the point is, the outside world shouldn't have to care what you're doing in there as long as it works and is reasonably efficient.
Maybe i m in the wrong planet, because all the software i see in the past ~10 years is an overcomplicated unmaintainable slow mess that needs more and more people to keep it from imploding.