this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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Abstraction.
That’s been the answer to this question since C became a thing, and took more resources than assembly. This isn’t new, you young fucks.
The other answer is that it is better and has more features. I know... I know... it's a novel concept for many people.
But if you had said, in 2010, that you were going to make a 3d game that ran in all of the major browsers and handled device browsers... you would have been laughed out of the room or you had multiple millions of dollars backing... now a 10 year old can do it in an afternoon.
because of the nested abstraction
While true that they are achieved via abstraction, abstraction doesn't create the better software or the more robust systems.
I fully agree with this. But I would phrase it slightly differently.
As computers and resources become better, and the libraries become more comprehensive, it takes fewer people less time to develop software that's good enough, but is a resource hog compared to the past. So the trend is software is going to use resources available so that the programmers don't have to spend too much time programming.
All software is built in an ecosystem of today, so it has to be good enough for today, but it doesn't have to run well on older hardware. Because the feedback loop doesn't include efficiency, it just includes good enough