I was surprised that TFS was not mentioned in the story (at least not as far as I have read).
It should have existed around the same time and other parts of MS were using it. I think it was released around 2005 but MS probably had it internally earlier.
I don't think the example was perfect which explains your wife's reaction.
Think of it more like the first delivery guy/girl left his/her car outside and wrote 123 on it. Then walked back.
The next one sees the car with a sign saying 123 and won't even ring the door bell or leave a package. Now you haven't gotten the package twice, it has not been delivered twice.
Sure you can complain that there's a car outside your home but in digital system you won't even see it. It would also cost the deliver firm a car for every package but that is not your problem and again, in the digital world the cost is a lot less than a car.
There is an argument that the street would be filled up with delivery vans ans there would be no more room for new deliveries to you or your neighbors but that is a limitation you could talk about. You probably can't handle an infinite number of packages delivered at the same time either and you won't wait an infinite amount of time for any specific package.
I don't see any reason why it shouldn't scale. It also allows you to use any backend language. If you write messy code in php and think it is the language 's fault then you can use something else. Rust, Go, Java, C#, Elixir. Everything should work. Just don't write messy code.
Do you really want the thousands of bugs that would occur if we shipped a real binary to each device?
And all security problems?
Sorry, the FooApp 1.1 does not support your iPhone 12. It also crashes on Samsung Galaxy 21 and lower and has a huge security problem on Windows 10 when using an Intel Core i5.
There was/is a state management lib called Mobx that was released years ago and was usually combined with React. It was kind of reactive, very easy to use and fast. It normally only updated the components that was effected by a state change.
It was a bit sad that it didn't get more popular and possibly improved. Some devs liked it but we were a minority compared to those who liked/used Redux.
One strange thing they did was to release a new "version" called Mobx State Tree which was very different. It had a great api but was different and slower.
Did you read the article?
The main issue with your idea is that an LLM won't know if the algorithm it created is any good, or even if it works at all. If it can't check that it will never know and never get better. You could ask it to generate a number of algorithms and then yourself choose the best one but then you have worked as a team, the LLM did not plan anything.
In Sweden we have a special authetication system that is owned by the banks. It is called BankID and generally works well but it has flaws, especially that you shouldn't use it if they call you and ask to you do it since that is a security risk by itself.
It works if I call a bank or insurance company or something like that. A robot voice will ask me to authenticate and when I have done so and is transferred to an operator they will see that I authenticated. So it works when I call them but not the other way around. We need a new system.
I know that some of them tried to rewrite large systems but failed. You are right that it is not just a money issue since they could spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the rewrite and then basically scrapping it.
It shows that they did want to switch but it was harder than they thought.
I remember it as at that time Windows and Unix was the common systems. I know we collected statistics for our business software offering that could run on multiple types of Unix and on Windows. Around 1998 I think 70% of all customers choose Windows. It was easier and cheaper.
So, I would say that the most common scripting language in the late 90s was VBScript.
I also can't recall any of the Unix gurus at our company using Python. They used bash, zsh or other shells.
This sounds like an idea without any real data. For people to prefer one they had to try both and I guess especially data science people just took the most common language in their field.
People seem to forget or miss that it took many, many years for Python to become popular outside data science. If it had just been clearly better or easier that transition should have gone much faster.
As someone else mentioned, at one point universities started using Python as an introduction language. I am still sad that they did not choose Ruby or js but here we are.
I think Angular looks like Htmx on crack but I do remember that Angular was first.
We used it in a project and it worked perfectly. If you have the need to write a lot of logic and changing of most of the UI parts dynamically on the page then React/Vue/Svelte/Angular is better suited. If you on the other hand has page that could be server rendered and some parts or lists that should load new parts into the page this may be the easiest way to do that.
You can also combine it with any backend language instead of us having one framework for C#, one for Java, one for Go and so on. I think this is one of the biggest USPs for Htmx.
I don't remember everything I've done or why. There is very little training data to be found for us as persons. IF they hack your phone or computer they might be able to store how you interact with the internet. Which things you browse and read, what you buy, how you write on social media. They could possible then create a digital twin (a clone) of your online presence but it would be a lot of work for very unclear gains. If they hack enough people they could learn some connections like that people interested in electric cars might also be interested in battery technology and solar panels, people who are interested in vegetarian food might also like to read/write about vegan food or the environment and so on. But I still think it would be a LOT of work just to end up creating a fake website selling fake batteries or vegetarian food that you either never deliver or that ends up being a poor replica of the good stuff.
It should have existed around the same time and other parts of MS were using it. I think it was released around 2005 but MS probably had it internally earlier.