That was a systematic, brutal and well-deserved evisceration of these frameworks, with details.

I started programming just a year or two before you, and one of the things that strikes me is that I always expected us, programmers, to get it together, but we never did.

A web page is the perfect example of a janky, patchwork technology which uses four (or three and a half, anyway) different data formats, HTML, CSS, JS and JSON, each with dramatically different philosophies and glaring defects.

A few weeks ago, I found myself using ` ` to do formatting!

I was glad that there were no mirrors in the room so I couldn't see my shame, but I was writing HTML into a Markdown document (I had no choice there) which only allows a subset of HTML and renders styles strangely, and I needed to be done with this small piece of a small task that had eaten all the time allotted.

I thought everything would be all gleaming chrome clean by now. I expected that we would have given up representing code as plaintext that gets translated into an internal format, twenty years ago. I expected that functions would now automatically come with automatically verifiable pre- and post-conditions so you could snap them together like conceptual Lego, like we have done with electronics components for well over seventy years!

What happened was the Minimal Viable Product. A huge amount of money got dumped into computers, and the race changed from being to "Who could produce the best software?" to "Who could produce something that barely worked, first?"

And what happened also was that it's more fun to write new code than fix old code, and it's more cool to use the new thing than the old, and why plan when you can just start coding?, so we have a proliferation of languages, formats and frameworks, most with no particular reason to exist.

"Off my lawn, rotten kids."

Thanks, great article, accept claps!