It's fair to say that the tech industry at the moment is not in a good place. Software engineers tend to be detached, demotivated and unwilling to care much about the work they're doing beyond their paycheck. Code quality is poor on the whole, made worse by the current spate of vibe coding and whatever other febrile ideas come out of Sam Altman's brain. Much of the software that we write is either useless or actively hurts people. And the talented, creative people that we most need in the industry are pushed to the margins of it.
Another excellent piece from Iris Meredith - strongly recommend reading if you want an idea of how to un-fuck software as a field.
Not who you asked, but both python and javascript have code smell as a core language feature and we are stuck with them by accident of history, not because anyone in particular thought it would be such a great idea for them to overshoot their original purpose to such a comical degree.
Also there’s a long history of languages meant to be used as an introduction to coding being spun off into ridiculously verbose enterprise equivalents that then everyone had to deal with (see delphi and visual basic) so there’s certainly a case for refusing to cede any more ground to dollar store editions of useful stuff under the guise of education.
Not who you asked, but both python and javascript have code smell as a core language feature and we are stuck with them by accident of history, not because anyone in particular thought it would be such a great idea for them to overshoot their original purpose to such a comical degree.
Also there’s a long history of languages meant to be used as an introduction to coding being spun off into ridiculously verbose enterprise equivalents that then everyone had to deal with (see delphi and visual basic) so there’s certainly a case for refusing to cede any more ground to dollar store editions of useful stuff under the guise of education.