We're not innovating, we're just forgetting slower

"Old man yells at cloud", but in so-so-so many words

It's always old people complaining that 20-year-olds didn't learn programming 40 years ago like they did when computers had 5 assembly instructions, and a beeper for peripherals.

I understand how it may sound like this, given that older people will talk about assembly and electronics which most young developers have absolutely no clue about today and are still considered "software developers".

But it's not specifically about assembly, it's about software design. You can take a modern programming language (say Swift or Rust) and look at how software written with those languages is architected, and the points still stand: abstractions above abstractions above abstractions because people don't understand the lower levels.

People routinely write completely wrong CMakeLists and then complain about CMake being "sooo bad". But give them Meson and they will make a mess as well. People have no clue about packaging and distribution, so they will say "it sucks sooo badly" and will distribute their code as a docker container, embedded in a 6GB Ubuntu image. Most emails you receive just contain a couple lines of useful information, yet they are generated by higher-level systems, full of HTML and bullshit and it's impossible to read in a simple client. Etc.

Software quality is going down year after year, it is a fact. Probably because it is becoming more and more accessible, but the fact remains.

> People routinely write completely wrong CMakeLists and then complain about CMake being "sooo bad".

I think this conflates a few issues.

I believe you that some people have problems with both CMake and Meson.

But in my opinion CMake's scripting language really is pretty poorly suited for it's role, e.g. because of its blurry distinction between strings and lists.