I know Elon Musk isn’t popular, but I saw an older interview of his where he said something important that most people don’t realize about technology. Sometimes we lose abilities we had in the past. His example was space travel. In the sixties we went to the moon. A decade later we could only put people in earth orbit. A few decades after that, not so much. I’ve seen this in software and networks. In some ways they have become far more powerful, in terms of bandwidth, CPU speed and the cost of storage. But software-wise, the runtime that we develop for today is a shadow of what it was in the 80s. We gave up a lot in going to the web, and made some terrible decisions, collectively, about languages and styling. JavaScript is horrendous for building complex systems, the worst language imaginable, but we use it as the default. And CSS, it’s disgusting how hard it is to control, at things it claims to be good at. If only we were using C or Pascal, and QuickDraw. When you study how these systems evolved, the discontinuities and how they were usually the result of a company trying to own something they could have let everyone build on (the Mac UI for example, and the networking built into every Mac). I’ve made some of these mistakes myself, so I’m not saying it’s about quality of individuals. It’s just that we don’t think enough about what we’re doing, and before you know it some things are tossed aside that were really good, and replaced them with systems that are grossly inadequate. #