Seibel: Do you think languages are getting better? You keep designing them, so hopefully you think it’s a worthwhile pursuit. Is it easier to write software now because of advances that we’ve made?

Steele: Well, it’s much easier now to write the kinds of programs we were trying to write 30 years ago. But I think our ambitions have grown tremendously. So I think programming is probably a more difficult activity than it was 30 years ago.

Seibel: And what are the things that are making it more difficult?

Steele: I think we’ve got people now who are just as smart as the people we had 30 years ago and they are being pushed to the limits of their abilities as people were 30 years ago—I’ve chosen 30 years ago as an arbitrary baseline because that’s when I got out of school. But the difference is that— as I remarked earlier—it’s not possible to understand everything that’s going on anymore. Or even to think you can. So I think that the programmers of today are up against a more difficult environment—still exercising the same amounts of ingenuity but in an environment that’s harder to understand. So we try to make more elaborate languages to help them deal with the uncertainty of those environments.

Coders at Work – Page 355 – Guy Steele