The New Standard Model
It’s been 35 years since I first wrote a program for someone else to use. A lot of things have changed:
| What | Then | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Documents | nroff | Markdown |
| Data | lines of text/regular expressions | JSON |
| Visualization | What’s visualization? | SVG |
| Glue | Pipes | HTTP |
| Code | C | JavaScript |
| Testing | Um… | xUnit/CI |
| Sharing | Tar files | HTTP |
| Answers | man pages and Usenet | Stack Overflow |
A lot of things have stayed the same, though. For example, there isn’t a row for “editing” because most programmers don’t do anything with their fancy IDEs that I didn’t do with Vi in 1982, even though those IDEs ship with tools that I would have considered magical.
So: what am I missing? Back then we used ASCII; today we (kind of) use Unicode, but I don’t think that’s as fundamental a change as the shift from mailing TAR files to sending HTTP requests. What else is big enough to belong on this list?