She did! A few years ago I actually tracked down the source of that, which was an interview done for an obscure textbook and republished it on my blog if you are interested in learning more: https://catskull.net/interview-with-margaret-h-hamilton.html
I think I basically agree. Kind of two steps forward, one step back. Also random one off personal projects has been fun. Feels like I can get more to show for the same small time investment.
But like, why aren't the major tech companies shipping incredible stuff? I assume Apple has always been several orders of magnitude better at software than I as an individual can be, but yet I don't see much if any improvement to what they're able to ship. Not to single Apple out here, it's just that I use their software more than any of the other FAANGs.
Author here! I'd love to hear your thoughts about software quality in general and how you think LLM tools have impacted it either positively or negatively.
I once heard a story about an old Logitech webcam driver in windows. Once it was installed, it would always scan for the webcam and if it wasn’t detected it would write to an error log. So if you set up the webcam once and then got rid of it without uninstalling the driver it would always dump logs upon logs. Eventually a user had their entire disk space filled and when they dug into it they found a single tens or hundreds of GB log file. Uninstalling the driver fixed it.
That joke's been around since Microsoft tried locking people into Internet Explorer, so ~30 years. Microsoft's been Microsofting for at least that long, Satya hasn't changed that.
When Microsoft first established a web presence, 1994 was probably the year if not 1993, www.microsoft.com showed "Welcome to Microsoft's web site. Where do you want to go today?" followed by a list of destinations throughout their site. They promoted the second of those sentences to their official slogan.
I've written quite a few web components that were more or less standalone. I've looked at lit quite a bit but never fully understood the "why". Could someone share their own personal experience with why they needed lit? What does it offer that can't be done with standard spec web components?
For me, a big draw of web components is that there's no `npm install` needed. I prefer to ship my components as plain JS files that can either be hot linked from a CDN or downloaded and served locally. Call me paranoid but I just don't fully trust node modules to be clean of bloat and spyware and I just don't want to have to regularly deal with updating them. I'd prefer to download a web component's static JS file a single time, read through it, and forget it. Maybe down the line I might revisit the source for the component as part of standard maintenance.
For example, I made a simple like button component[1]. Later, my friend made a cool component for showing a burst of emoji confetti[2]. I decided to optionally pull it in if an attribute was set on the like component. I downloaded his source and hosted from my own domain. However, there was actually a bug in his code that caused the confetti to "rain" if you spammed the like button a few times quickly. He fixed that, but I actually kind of liked it so I just didn't update the source for the confetti component.
> I've looked at lit quite a bit but never fully understood the "why".
Because people don't want to write hundreds of lines of useless boilerplate by hand.
Web Components API is verbose enough that you want to handle it with at least some abstraction. And at one point it was explicitly marketed as aimed at library/framework developers.
