The scenario you talk about happens for sure. And some of those protests are legitimate; we've made little advance in real productivity since the 70s but all the while churning languages and libraries and environments like fashionable clothes partly because programmers are on the average young and inexperienced. So after a decade or two of riding the wheel, a lot of engineers decide it's pointless and just kind of check out. (Not me, FWIW; I'm on board with React Hooks and looking for an excuse to use ReasonML.)
On the other hand, ageism is real. When I was younger I was told more than once by managers, straight up, this candidate is too old so find an excuse not to hire. And now in my 40s, when I walk into some companies for an interview, I can feel the decision has been made before I even start talking. Not everywhere, not even most places, but it happens for sure and it's not even that subtle.
> we've made little advance in real productivity since the 70s but all the while churning languages and libraries and environments like fashionable clothes partly because programmers are on the average young and inexperienced.
Making a real time video chat client is now a literal programming exercise, it used to be the domain of multi-million dollar venture backed startups that were valued in the billions.
Real time chat between users is now a feature that is added to an application in a day, or even a few hours if you follow any of the myriads of tutorials available on YouTube.
Go from writing a UI in C/C++ to writing it in any of the higher level languages. Assuming you don't get caught in some design pattern trap that results in massive code bloat, it is now possible to do things in hours that used to take days to weeks.
Heck, transparency is no longer "write some ASM" routines, it is setting an opacity variable!
Some tech stacks, such as those for making basic CRUD apps, may have actually degraded a bit, but at the same time someone who is only slightly technical can now drag and drop their way to an online store front that is a fair bit more powerful that Viaweb was back in the day!
Heck, it is possible to now go from an empty folder to writing+deploy HTTPS API endpoints in under half an hour.
Edit:
More stuff!
App (not web!) updates can be deployed to users by uploading a file and having a client pull down the changes and seamlessly switch over to the new code next time the app is launched. Versus mailing out disks!
There are app stores that you upload intermediate code to and they'll compile apps to the appropriate architecture for a customer's device!
During 72 hours of coding for Ludem Dare, game developers and artists work together to create games that are as complex as a full fledged commercial game would have been 25 years ago.
And of course, many corporate software engineering efforts continue to fail or go massively over budget for largely political reasons.
In the 1980s a spell-checker was a very complicated project and now it's simply a hashmap lookup. But it's not because we invented the hashmap since then, or nobody in the 80s would have known that, it just wasn't possible with the RAM limitations at the time.
Likewise, moving from ASM to C to Smalltalk is a night-and-day improvement... that we made in the 1970s. The difference again is what hardware we get to run it on.
Video game construction kits existed in the 80s, and 80s GUIs looked pretty much the same as they do now if you ignore resolution.
Drag and drop application development was huge in the 90s, and the CRUD applications of the time weren't significantly different than now, other than they didn't run in a browser. HTTPS wasn't hard back then, and you could write a Perl endpoint in half an hour easy.
When it comes to things like playing video, it's easy now but I don't even really consider it programming. You're just installing software that does it for you.
Libraries and OSS and StackOverflow and various services have made a real difference. I'm not arguing that we haven't made progress. I'm just saying that I can see how some people feel that this year's incremental advance or retreat is not nearly as exciting if they've seen how the last 20 worked out.
Your discussion of "real time video chat clients" has me cracking up; it seemed that a myriad of pieces of software had this figured out in the 2000s, but today I can't think of a single piece of software that I'd actually want to use for video chat. All of them have some fatal Achilles' Heel: Facetime has security problems/previously did not have group chats/is exclusive to Apple OSes, Skype is laggy and has more connection problems than any piece of software I've ever used, Google Hangouts chokes once you get to 3 or 4 participants and frequently has issues with even 2 participants, Duo is only usable on Android/iOS as far as I know... does anybody have a good client that they can actually recommend?
Myself, I've gone back to using Ventrilo because I realized that I really don't care about having video.
I mean sure, video chat is overrated... but the tech is there, it just turned out it isn't quite as desirable as first imagined!
Firefox Hello worked remarkably well IMHO, it was super simple to use.
The field is full of video chat clients though. Uber-Conf is popular, although I think the % of problem free calls I've had with them is less than 50%.
Zoom has worked well for me, no real issues.
Facebook Messenger, privacy issues aside, works well.
> Go from writing a UI in C/C++ to writing it in any of the higher level languages.
I've never done this in C/C++ specifically but I have to imagine that the GTK bindings are mostly language agnostic. Using a tool like Glade[0], you can build a GTK GUI with ease.
On the other hand, ageism is real. When I was younger I was told more than once by managers, straight up, this candidate is too old so find an excuse not to hire. And now in my 40s, when I walk into some companies for an interview, I can feel the decision has been made before I even start talking. Not everywhere, not even most places, but it happens for sure and it's not even that subtle.