Programming peaked

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Nostalgia vs “old man yells at cloud”

  • Many readers see the essay as a familiar genre: idealizing a narrow slice of the past (enterprise Java + Eclipse) while cherry‑picking modern pain points.
  • Others counter that some regressions are real: more glue code, more tools, more fragile stacks, and worse average UX despite vastly better hardware.
  • Several people note that every generation complains “things are collapsing”; some argue this is mostly noise, others say sometimes the pessimists are actually observing genuine decline in specific dimensions.

Tooling, stacks, and agency

  • One camp says: nothing stopped you then and nothing stops you now from using Java, Eclipse, local servers, or simple LAMP‑style stacks—those worlds still exist.
  • Pushback: at work you rarely choose your stack; employment, hiring pipelines, and “can we hire for this?” heavily bias teams toward Docker/k8s/Node/React/Cloud.
  • Some describe still‑pleasant setups (Java 21 + minimal deps, Node/Express/Postgres, or PHP + HTML/JS) and argue the real problem is stack choice, not the era.

Complexity, coordination, and mediocrity

  • Commenters tie today’s complexity to coordination: many platforms (web/mobile/TV), teams, and deployment targets drive containerization, microservices, and elaborate CI.
  • Others blame cargo‑culting and CV‑driven development: people adopt k8s, React, LLMs, etc. for résumé value more than product needs.
  • There’s frustration with “monkey see, monkey do” practices, impostor syndrome, and AI‑assisted code dumps leading to bloated, poorly understood systems.

Performance, UX, and “enshittification”

  • Several reminisce about how fast 2000s desktops and IDEs felt compared to today’s Electron apps, web bloat, and sluggish debuggers.
  • Some note you can still get snappy experiences with Linux/KDE/Xfce and aggressive ad/JS blocking, but even native apps often have worse input latency than decades ago.
  • Cloud is seen both as an overpriced rebrand of rented VMs and as a huge operational win over hand‑maintained on‑prem boxes.

Java, JavaScript, React, and the web

  • Mixed views on Java’s “peak”: some recall painful Java 1.4/EE tooling and slow builds; others praise powerful debugging and hot‑patching compared to Rust/C.
  • Strong criticism of React and the modern JS ecosystem: extra build steps, JSX regressions, SPA overuse, and heavy clients where simple HTML/CSS/JS would do.
  • Counterpoint: JavaScript’s dominance came from how easy it was to put things on a screen; compared to terminal‑only beginnings, that made programming accessible and fun.

AI and modern tools

  • Some find LLMs and modern editors (Helix, Rust tooling, Nix, LSPs) make 2025 the best time yet to program, especially for solo or casual developers.
  • Others avoid AI, seeing it as noise that encourages over‑engineering and loss of understanding, especially among juniors.