I don't think it is harder on programmers now (or easier for programmers in the past). I can do things in Python that would make me a 10x programmer 40 years ago if the hardware could have supported it. They also didn't have stack overflow back then...just a dog-eared copy of some old C book. They didn't have hardware like we do that would've made a supercomputer back then look like something you'd put in a toaster today (that was a poorly worded sentence...sorry). The challenges they faced were numerous.
My point is that the actual complexity layers are much worse now. Back in the Commodore 64 days, many users knew the machine inside and out. They could program in assembly, do graphics on the display...etc, all while understanding exactly what is going on. None of that was easy or as efficient as what I can do in Excel today or some 3D graphics program, but it was something you could wrap your head around. Today, we have huge monolithic amounts of code or hardware for everything. I don't understand anything about my hardware, I don't understand the millions of lines of windows, I don't understand the millions of lines in Microsoft Office, or how my web browser works or how Unreal engine was built...etc. It's the product of millions of people working together to create something beyond the limits of a single human.
If we wanted to truly start from scratch, there's no way (that I can see) where we can reinvent all of that and actually get a large amount of users. It's not impossible, but Herculean. You could do something if the to-do list was MUCH smaller, like what was done with Temple OS or Collapse OS.
I don't think it is harder on programmers now (or easier for programmers in the past). I can do things in Python that would make me a 10x programmer 40 years ago if the hardware could have supported it. They also didn't have stack overflow back then...just a dog-eared copy of some old C book. They didn't have hardware like we do that would've made a supercomputer back then look like something you'd put in a toaster today (that was a poorly worded sentence...sorry). The challenges they faced were numerous.
My point is that the actual complexity layers are much worse now. Back in the Commodore 64 days, many users knew the machine inside and out. They could program in assembly, do graphics on the display...etc, all while understanding exactly what is going on. None of that was easy or as efficient as what I can do in Excel today or some 3D graphics program, but it was something you could wrap your head around. Today, we have huge monolithic amounts of code or hardware for everything. I don't understand anything about my hardware, I don't understand the millions of lines of windows, I don't understand the millions of lines in Microsoft Office, or how my web browser works or how Unreal engine was built...etc. It's the product of millions of people working together to create something beyond the limits of a single human.
If we wanted to truly start from scratch, there's no way (that I can see) where we can reinvent all of that and actually get a large amount of users. It's not impossible, but Herculean. You could do something if the to-do list was MUCH smaller, like what was done with Temple OS or Collapse OS.