Shipping Culture Is Hurting Us

I write complex software too but I "ship" to myself early and often. I start by trying to solve a hard problem as fast and as quickly as possible in a naive way so that I can experiment more freely. This gives me more insight into the problem itself and into the solution space. The solution often changes -- sometimes it's the problem that changes.

If I were working with a customer or a startup I would definitely "ship" early and often, too, but I wouldn't give much weight to these "releases". They're just something to play with and to cut the shape for the problem.

The Question is this: "Why do people not replace VT100 style terminals?" There are two reasons. tl;dr Terminals have other reasons than programming in them and people actually reinvent how you can program on a daily basis. See more in depth arguments below.

The first thing is that people actually still need the old terminal stuff. There are loads of old computers you want to communicate with (just think of your pa trying to relive old times be trying to get the 80's game console to work). And there are also a lot of technologies that really need something that stupid, e.g., if you develop your own embedded system you might actually communicate with it using these VT100 commands. So yeah. Wow. A Terminal (emulator) doesn't have the task to show your text editor. You can start GVim if you just want to show your editor. They have the task to communicate. They can communicate with the system you are running them on or you can use them to communicate with another terminal. If you want to replace them, you have to replace the software in your pa's console (and probably some hardware), you have to find a new way to develop fresh, small computers, you have to find a new way SSH works, you have to find a new way to show your text editor. It's not impossible, but it's probably so hard that nobody would like to spend their whole life (work time, spare time, youth to death) doing it. It's not worth that much. Summary: It's not worth it, if you consider the whole picture.

And second argument: People actually do, if you just think about use cases like coding, gaming, etc. A modern game doesn't run in a Text shell as e.g. Nethack could. It runs in a graphical shell and is represented to you in 3D, e.g., GTA 5. Also there are many people who use IDEs. Unix+Bash+Texteditor was actually an IDE. Eclipse etc are a new way of thinking about the editing task with helpers like compilers, static analysers, debuggers, performance analysers, unit test runners, etc. There are even people who reinvent the programming wheel from another point of view, e.g., have a look at NoFlow. The reason the other stuff is not dying is because it's useful for other reasons. That doesn't mean you have to still use it for programming (also some people, like me, choose to). Summary: People do work on finding modern ways to program.

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world

I know it's not your fault but this statement doesn't make any sense. Web is made of hyper-linked content not jQuery animations and AJAX.

But, if you have code which compares one-element arrays with strings, you have bigger problems than javascript. I can't recall seeing any serious comparison Batman-style bug. Hypothetically, that kind of stuff wouldn't even be a logic bug, but a design issue that was allowed by the dynamic type system. Solution: don't bitch about Javascript, use something else.