I’d argue software design has never been taken seriously by industry. It’s always cast in negative terms, associated with individuals seen as politically wrong/irrelevant and brings out ton of commenters who can’t wait to tell us about this one time somebody did something wrong, therefore it’s all bad. Worse, design commits the cardinal sin of not being easily automated. Because of this, people cargo cult designs that tools impose on them, and chafe at the idea that they should think further on what they’re doing. People really want to outsource this thinking to The Experts.
It doesn’t help that isn’t really taught, but is something you self-teach over years, it is seen as less real than code (ergo, not as important). All of these beliefs are ultimately self-limiting and keep you at advanced beginner stage in terms of what you can build, however.
Basically, programmers collectively choose to keep the bar as low as possible and almost have a crab-like mentality on this subject.
I can see a swing finally starting. It isn’t “huge” by any stretch, but at the same time
“deVElOpErS aRe MoRE EXpEnSivE tHaN HArDwaRE”
Commenters are no longer just given free internet points. This is encouraging as these people controlled the narrative around spending time on thinking things through and what types of technical debt you should accept for like 20 YEARS.
I think maybe people are finally sick of having 128 gigs of ram being used by a single 4kb text file.
There is some truth to the idea that developer time is expensive, and can dwarf the monetary gains gotten through micro-optimization.
I agree that some people took the idea to mean "what's a profiler?" and that is why our modern machines still feel sluggish despite being mind-bogglingly fast.
This might be driven by the cost per computation being vastly lower while the benefit having remained mostly constant. There is little incentive for making a text editor that runs in 10k of memory because there is no benefit compared to one that runs in 10 megabytes or, soon, 10 gigabytes.
I spend a lot of my day in VScode and PyCharm and the compute resources I consume in an hour are more than what the Apollo program consumed over its full existence. Our collective consumption at any given decade is most likely larger than the sum of computing resources consumed up until that point in our history.
It doesn’t help that isn’t really taught, but is something you self-teach over years, it is seen as less real than code (ergo, not as important). All of these beliefs are ultimately self-limiting and keep you at advanced beginner stage in terms of what you can build, however.
Basically, programmers collectively choose to keep the bar as low as possible and almost have a crab-like mentality on this subject.