This week a former engineer for the Microsoft Windows Core OS Division shared an insightful (and very entertaining) list with “some changes I have noticed over the last 20 years” in the computer programming world. Some excerpts:
- Some programming concepts that were mostly theoretical 20 years ago have since made it to mainstream including many functional programming paradigms like immutability, tail recursion, lazily evaluated collections, pattern matching, first class functions and looking down upon anyone who don’t use them…
- 3 billion devices run Java. That number hasn’t changed in the last 10 years though…
- A package management ecosystem is essential for programming languages now. People simply don’t want to go through the hassle of finding, downloading and installing libraries anymore. 20 years ago we used to visit web sites, downloaded zip files, copied them to correct locations, added them to the paths in the build configuration and prayed that they worked.