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Maybe not, but I never called anyone stupid either yet he extrapolated and claimed that I did. It works both ways.
Hardware has.
The case has been made that there has been virtually no progress in software.
"The interesting thing about where we are now [compared to the 1950s] is that after 25 orders of magnitude of improvement in hardware is that our software has improved by nothing like that. Maybe by not even one order of magnitude. Possibly not even at all."
(This is an awesome talk, btw, even though it's 10 years old and was at a Ruby conference).
Yes! That's what I was talking about.
Of course hardware has become much faster - but at the same time software has got more bloated and so using a computer 1980 or in 2020 feels about the same in terms of speed. And that is what counts because what we use is a combination of hardware and software.
Just look at programmer editors and compilers. There was a time when Microsoft shipped their whole compiler incl. a really nice debugger on a couple of 5.25" floppies. Today's Visual Studio gobbles up tens of gigabytes on your disk. And their editor (Visual Studio Code) is a bloated monstrosity, in part because some morons had the idea to base it on basically a full browser (which themselves are bloated monstrosities).
Well, why would there be anywhere near 25 orders of magnitude increases in software? These are algorithms (math), and that shit doesn't evolve at anything but glacier pace. Even so, when working on slow ass hardware, you're already going to start from an optimized algorithm that should be taking the least amount of instructions to do so. And compilers have gotten better over the years.
Having faster hardware reduces time to market and improves responsiveness. Much of that "bloat" is a trade-off for other things, usually convenience, and has a net benefit if it saved hours and hours of development or labour.
Also, either people have poor memories, or their hardware in 2020 is shit. I know jsg is older than me now, and I lived in the days where you couldn't play an mp3 and burn a CD at the same time, let alone h265 encoding and listening to music while browsing the web at hundreds of Mbps at the same time in 2020.