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Comment by cies | Hacker News Reader

I find comparing telnet to Twitter disingenuous. Back in the days big banks/insurance had big application, developed by big teams.

I'm not saying that what point out is not true, but telnet is prolly best compared to openssh, which is seems to be developed by 2[0] devs, and waaaaay more complex. Both are tools, both may be used for various over-the-network interactions with OSes.

> don't ask me why, I don't get it either

It's an ad network. It has to deal with compliance in many regions. There are mobile apps.

[0]: https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable/graphs/contribut...

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Anything can be developed by one person or thousands people. It depends on how organisation is managed and what other software the software need to support and communicate with.

Right. I wanted to focus though in the most "demanded" programs back then and now.

I would say back then, the most demanded programs were command line programs (small utilities that do one thing well).

Nowadays the most "demanded" programs are programs that want to attract as many users as possible (and so, they have to "scale", they have to be "distributed"), programs that need to grow as much as possible (the bigger the program the bigger the company the bigger the profit), programs that need to be rewritten in new tech stacks every 3 or so years.

I guess the mentality has changed along the way as well.

Demanded is a weird term here. No one demands "ls", not the banks/insurance companies back then, not the Twitter users today. It's a tool, not an application. You dont buy your computer (or cloud VM) to run "ls".

Back in the days consumers were not in the software picture so much. Maybe some pre-PCs were catering for home users, maybe some BBS to dial into, but that was it.

This has changed. And this is why we have Twitter.

> programs that need to be rewritten in new tech stacks every 3 or so years.

Where do you get this from? I dont see such trend at all. Okay, some library needs to be replaced, and we share more code nowadays (the stacks are deeper, but what would you expect? more cycles to burn and more ecosystems). But no-one factors in the cost of constant rewriting to stay up to date with the hippest stacks.

> > programs that need to be rewritten in new tech stacks every 3 or so years.

> Where do you get this from?

I'd guess front end dev. 3 years is positively prehistoric laughing material for all the up and coming resume-driven-development front end rockstars.

No it's not, get your facts checked. React.js for instance is 7 years old and here to stay. Angular 2+ and Vuejs are both younger but here to stay too.

Frontend dev has largely matured and stabilized, it's not the shit show it used to be anymore.

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