I mean, if you'd like to put it in perspective, try developing for IE6. You don't even have a dev console.
I had a recent revelation when watching a video someone posted of a Symbolics Lisp machine, and its legendary dev environment. That being - it's basically just a modern browser devtools, but for the whole OS. Turtles all the way down.
But somehow, despite having the bird in our hand, we as an industry lost them, and regressed to having vastly-inferior tools to those Symbolics devtools, and only gradually rebuilt them over the course of multiple decades.
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As a harsh rebuttal to the OP article; I think the number one thing that's "whooshing" over that guy's head is that if someone develops a proof-of-concept for something, it doesn't invalidate the far-more-significant trick of making it widespread. Often it's the latter that's far more difficult, because it requires eliminating compromises that weren't acceptable to people before.
The strange thing about the software industry these days is that quite a few "truisms" about software development have been completely invalidated. Ironclad laws of how the world works have slowly been rendered completely false, and it's happened not through some sudden eureka development but through some slow, sneaky, iterative improvement. The same sort of thing i.e. that made solar cheaper than coal, or made SSDs cheaper than HDDs (I don't know if we've actually crossed that line yet, but it seems pretty inevitable that once the investment impetus behind HDDs collapses, we'll eventually get there). Flatscreens versus CRTs was another great example.
I had a recent revelation when watching a video someone posted of a Symbolics Lisp machine, and its legendary dev environment. That being - it's basically just a modern browser devtools, but for the whole OS. Turtles all the way down.
But somehow, despite having the bird in our hand, we as an industry lost them, and regressed to having vastly-inferior tools to those Symbolics devtools, and only gradually rebuilt them over the course of multiple decades.
-------
As a harsh rebuttal to the OP article; I think the number one thing that's "whooshing" over that guy's head is that if someone develops a proof-of-concept for something, it doesn't invalidate the far-more-significant trick of making it widespread. Often it's the latter that's far more difficult, because it requires eliminating compromises that weren't acceptable to people before.
The strange thing about the software industry these days is that quite a few "truisms" about software development have been completely invalidated. Ironclad laws of how the world works have slowly been rendered completely false, and it's happened not through some sudden eureka development but through some slow, sneaky, iterative improvement. The same sort of thing i.e. that made solar cheaper than coal, or made SSDs cheaper than HDDs (I don't know if we've actually crossed that line yet, but it seems pretty inevitable that once the investment impetus behind HDDs collapses, we'll eventually get there). Flatscreens versus CRTs was another great example.