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?
In the wake of posts about Shopify's support for white nationalists and DataCamp's attempts to cover up sexual harassment
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