Blow routinely trashes software he’s never had to write.
Single user software that is the sole focused application when it is running. It saves nothing of importance and doesn’t alter any system to any appreciable degree.
You know what’s more impressive than The Witness? Any web browser. It has to deal with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector. A web browser can run VS Code. It can run Doom. It can be made to run The Witness.
Blow does not remotely acknowledge the complexity needed to make modern software. He treats his incredibly small domain as the pinnacle of the craft.
You take for granted that delivering the user value of a web application needs to be in the form of dealing with "HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector." There is nothing inevitable about that.
No, I'm saying the web browser itself is an incredibly complex piece of software that has to deal with a lot more than what The Witness does.
I actually said nothing about web applications themselves.
Don't mistake flash for substance. The Witness may be pretty, but it gets to throw away a lot of complexity. Even as a game, it's not terribly complex.
The only point of the web browser is to achieve the user value accomplished by web pages and web applications. My point is there's nothing about that problem which inevitably requires "incredibly complex" software.
Single user software that is the sole focused application when it is running. It saves nothing of importance and doesn’t alter any system to any appreciable degree.
You know what’s more impressive than The Witness? Any web browser. It has to deal with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, SGML, SVG, etc. An entire runtime environment with garbage collector. A web browser can run VS Code. It can run Doom. It can be made to run The Witness.
Blow does not remotely acknowledge the complexity needed to make modern software. He treats his incredibly small domain as the pinnacle of the craft.