I've been programming professionally since around 2003. I'd say I caught the late-stages OOP craze (or maybe after-craze) though not really the origin or rise of OOP. My first job was in a C++ codebase, and I spent a lot of time learning the OOP design patterns (or really, the "how do we make C++ behave well" patterns).
That said, the rise of OOP is probably measured in a decade or two. It eventually "spawned" whole new programming languages, that eventually got a lot of popularity. But this is over a much longer time-frame than how quickly we went from no such thing as AI coding, to (now) coding agents. It also didn't affect the entire industry in the same way - hell, some people were still writing assembly in the 80s as the OOP craze was winding up. I don't have actual stats, but I imagine coding agents are far more ubiquitious across far more industries/languages/stacks, for more quickly.
> In my list I didn’t even mention the internet, the web, smartphones, and the cloud, all of which had a very broad effect on programming and programmers,
The internet (or maybe the web) I'd say was probably the more transformative thing. Cloud affected a lot of things too but not quite as much and didn't make quite as big a difference to the day-to-day work. I deployed things pre-cloud and post-cloud (though honestly mostly during the early-stage cloud), and there wasn't such a big difference.
Look, at the end of the day you can't just compare AI to other technologies blindly and say "well they were big hypes, this is the same". By actually looking at what it's doing and how it's affecting things, it's fairly clear it has a much bigger impact on the day-to-day work of programming, as opposed to anything else you mentioned.
I'm not saying this is the end of development, for all I know this will mean more developers! But I think software development will look fundamentally different in 5 years in a way that is far more widespread than in any other of these changes.
I’m not comparing anything blindly; that is in fact the exact opposite of my advice. Nor am I saying all big hypes are equivalent, just that there’s always a big hype about something, and you need a strategy to stay levelheaded about them despite the irrational polarized yelling you hear.
I use LLMs every day in my work (both to help write code and as a component of the thing I’m coding). They’re pretty cool. But as an engineer you need to make decisions based on what they actually do, in your empirical observation, not what people tell you they will do, eventually, in their fantasies. Speculating about that is just noise. The engineer’s job is to find the signal.
In my observation, I can trust an LLM to write code way more than last year, but I still have to keep it on a very short leash. Will it be better next year? I don’t know. Nobody does.
Yes, agreed on basically everything.