From my personal account, I started with PHP and Perl (high school and college) and then graduated to Ruby on Rails (early dev career) and now its Python and JS.
I would say Ruby on Rails was a 10x on raw PHP in terms of feature specs per hour and AI is a 10x on Ruby on Rails (and its derivatives).
We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.
> We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.
Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.
> Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.
Roll to disbelieve on this one. There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy. I'm not even talking React/Next or whatever - this was before RoR, before Django (or at least very early versions of both).
I think it's pretty impossible to look around and not notice that technical advances have improved a lot of things in the world - why does it sound credible that programming itself hasn't improved at all in twenty years? Even look at languages like C++ today compared to 20 years ago, they're massively different - do you think all those changes to the languages are neutral or negative in terms of productivity?
Quality does not change as fast :)) Actually, most of the times, when things go faster, the quality drops as fast.
> There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy
Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community. This 90% part can't be automated by AI or fast-tracked using RoR, Django or whatever. So much that none of the hundreds of wordpress alternatives created in the past 2 decades got any closer to replace it.
> Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community.
I completely agree. I just didn't think we were talking about that aspect, just how long it takes to actually build the code of WordPress.
You might be saying that making the technical-building aspects of most technical products go faster won't necessarily have as big an impact as many programmers believe. Programming isn't the core of most products to the degree most programmers think, and instead the core of most products/companies is more about product thinking, sales & marketing, etc. I agree with this sentiment a lot.
That aside, I think there's no question it's faster to program in Python or C++ right now, than it was 20 years ago. Things really have improved on the programming language front (and related libraries, and other advances).
Citation needed