I'll grant that computers today do things that are categorically more complex than anything previous generations attempted. I'll grant that so much of Chuck Moore's work was predicated on character sets, that would only encode Latin characters, and modern computing needing to deal with Unicode, non-latin text rendering, non-western dates and calendars, different kinds of networking etc etc yes I'll grant that that's all more complex. I don't find the increased complexity of computers depressing, I find the abandonment of the project of soundness depressing.

I thoroughly believe that we can do complex things in a sound way. computers randomly breaking is not a given. it just takes time and dedication and focus, things that that above all else I blame our economic system for being unable to provide.

and beyond just the triumph of capital over any alternative, it really breaks my heart that computers are just objectively worse today than they were in the time of Chuck Moore. I try and not be an old man yelling at the cloud about this but we've given up on stability, soundness, maintainability. these are non-goals of modern computing, sacrificed at the altar of shareholder value.

it is wild that an official update of the operating system could break otherwise working code in a way that is impossible to determine even what is happening, let alone what to do to fix it. but this is what we've come to expect. computers break all the time, software breaks all the time, stuff crashes, you restart, whatever. and this isn't even factoring in the incoming wave of vibe-coded systems which make no attempt at correctness.

this isn't what computing was, there were attempts -- serious attempts! -- at developing theory and practice to build systems that were stable and correct in the face of usage and updates. we put half a century into that. and now we live in a kind of collective surrender. it's really depressing. as someone who has dedicated a life to computing, it's really fucking depressing.

the indignity of putting these people through the tedium and stupidity of modern computing is also really jarring. these are people that imagined a different kind of computing, a kind of future that never got built, that got sidelined in favor of advertisements in the start menu, applications with in-app purchases, the global network as a mall, capital over computing.

and they've lived long enough to see it play out. Joe Armstrong talked about wrestling with grunt and gulp from the JavaScript ecosystem in one of his last talks. I've had the pleasure of working with Larry Cuba and most of our difficulties have been wrangling python package management on Windows. and now Chuck Moore gets his life work sniped to death by a random Windows update.

modern computers are a mess of accidental complexity and these are people that represented something different, living long enough to watch something worse become mainstream.