hn • r/hackernews
Comment on: The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan
A lot of what Blow says is not entirely accurate. For example he presents a simple picture of declining software quality over time, but anyone who was around at the time knows that both desktop OSes and desktop applications (including web browsers) were certainly much more crashy, and probably more buggy in general, than they are now. Likely quality has started to decline again over the past decade, but it's still not remotely back to where it was. It's hard not to suspect that Blow passes over this because it tends to contradict his "higher-level languages and more infrastructure → declining