Jonathan Blow

web development got harder and more complex because we drastically changed our requirements for what the web should be able to do (interactivity, instant server-feedback, etc) with the tools used (html/css/js) slow to catch up.

for every language, there are now thousands of "black boxes" (call them packages, gems, ..) you can knit together and call it software. that surely must be easier and faster than how we wrote software 10 years ago.

The base concepts are simpler. No memory management, types, SIMD, threads, etc. You have simple variables, control flow structures and functions. Yes, it's considerably harder to build a functional car out of legos, but...

... once you've figured out how to build a functional car with legos, you can teach your 10 year old nephew how to build his own.

If it's so simple, then why are the things built with it so complicated, and unreliable, and hard to maintain, and have to be re-built completely every once in a while?

I explained why. Do you think a car made of legos would be easy to maintain or reliable? I didn't mean a toy car, I meant a daily driver car.

Check yourself. You're arguing simultaneously that building your car out of legos is advantageous (easy enough for a 10 year old?) and also a terrible idea.

Do you have an argument or opinion of your own are you just going to incorrectly rephrase my statements? I never claimed it was advantageous.

I'm sorry I thought being able to teach a 10-year-old was the advantage?

I'm not sure what you don't understand? The argument is that 1) tools make the web accessible to non-experts, and 2) the products made using the tools are of a lower quality than what an expert could have made without using them.