Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

No it did not.

It killed the golden age of mediocre software developers, which includes the over inflated role of web development which that can be safely done by LLMs.

Yep, it should be no surprise that things that ought to require no code or very little code but currently require tons of it are not safe long term careers for programmers.

If we can make self driving taxis, we can also make putting documents on the internet not require tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript.

Around 1999, eBay code was c++ compiled into a "ebayisapi.dll". It became too large for x86. I'm guessing it had lots of COM+ and must have been a disaster, bodies everywhere.

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBayS...

Oh man, was it implemented as an ISAPI extension? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild.

Something like 4 million lines of code with hundreds of people working on the same thing. It was converted to Java by 2002 so they knew it was a crisis.