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The (other) Web we lost

In the 1970’s we taught programming by looking at machine code, then assembler, and finally introduced high level languages like FORTRAN, BASIC and COBOL. The analogy I’d draw is that HTML, CSS and to a great extent JavaScript are the low level structures. And now people are learning higher level abstractions that let them do more specific functions more easily. There are divided roles — how many people master computer science and can develop new methods in AI, develop new user interface models, understand the psychology of human computer interactions, and grasp enough of business to maximise business functions? It’s a small number of highly competent individuals. The early web was easier to grasp, and we asked less of it, and we had small numbers of largely highly competent individuals who made the small numbers of websites we offered, work.

Now, 20 years on, we’re asking that many orders of magnitudes more websites deliver serious business value, in less than a second, on a more diverse range of devices.

You’re going to get specialisation — most people can’t handle the breadth or don’t want to. You’re going to get domain specific languages, and people specialising in those.

You say “fragmentation” as if it is a bad thing. Personally, I’m fine with it. I don’t see why building websites and apps for hundreds of millions of businesses, with very common structures for most of them, shouldn’t result in large numbers of web devs with no understanding of machine code, no competence in programming microcode, no understanding of gate delays, no facility with assembly language, no appreciation of predicates, and no ability to write a JIT compiler. But they should be able to inspect HTML5 and at least work out which high level DSL is generating their current misery, and fix it.

There will be a wide range of languages and competencies. And there’ll be a relative handful of serious dudes who grasp the whole thing, well enough to make fundamental changes. That’s been the history of how we, as a species, tackle technology.

We don’t ask that a modern car mechanic should be able to smelt ore, design materials, create production lines and be an active petrochemical chemist. We expect them to run the diagnostics some clever specialist has put together, and disassemble and replace a part that a robot previously put in place during manufacture. Life evolves. So does tech. Learn the new stuff, and expect it to be replaced in the next decade, by other stuff.

Quit bitching about a Golden Age in which a miniscule fraction of the current count of websites, did less, for a wealthy elite.

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