I chose software engineering. 3 years into the program the head of the department made a speech at an event to the effect of "Software hasn't changed in the last 10 years". It instantly devalued the entire program for me.
I have news for you... He's not wrong. The porcelain is different, but the same methodologies and processes are in place. The biggest change recently is distributed (mostly ignored) version control, that's 20 years old, and continuous integration/development (probably also around 20 years old, but only catching on in the last 10-15 years).
Computer science has changed more, there are lots of developments in the last 5-10 years.
The biggest change I’ve seen in 20 years is that things like DVCS and actual good tool chains for languages people actually use are available and in use.
If you switch to a different framework that does the same things slightly differently and makes something more convenient, and do that three times over the years, that's still perfectly consistent with "Software hasn't changed in the last 10 years" - it's simply not a meaningful change, nor would be switching to a different programming language.
I know where you come from and I know where the people who are responding to you come from too.
Software has changed in the last 10 years, but a lot of it has changed superficially. A green software engineer most likely won't be able to tell the difference between a superficial change and a fundamental change.
It has a lot to do with the topic of this thread. "Quality Software" It's a loaded term. There's no formal definition, everyone has their own opinion on it and even then these people with "opinions" can't even directly pinpoint what it is. So the whole industry just builds abstraction after abstraction without knowing whether the current abstraction is actually close to "quality" then the previous abstraction. It all starts out with someone feeling annoyed, then they decide to make a new thingie or library and then they find out that this new thing has new annoyances and the whole thing moves in a great flat circle.
That's the story of the entire industry just endless horizontal progress without ever knowing if we're getting better. A lot of the times we've gotten worse.
That being said there have been fundamental changes. Machine learning. This change is fundamental. But most people aren't referring to that here.
> "Software hasn't changed in the last 10 years". It instantly devalued the entire program for me.
As opposed to maths, physics, philosophy, civil engineering, classical studies which have gone through complete revolutions in their topics, problems and study methods in the last 10 years?
