Jonathan Blow: Preventing the Collapse of Civilization

In this talk, video game programmer Jonathan Blow speaks of the sometimes unnecessary complexity that comes with writing software. Systems that would initially be well understood (e.g. a single person can read and change them) are now split in different services and abstractions that are harder to inherit and could eventually lose meaning (the collapse of civilization).

I’m a bit more optimistic, but he does give a worrisome example (paraphrasing):

As video game engines such as Unity continue to gain popularity and custom engines become a rarity, will there be anyone who knows how to write them 50 years from now? Will anyone still be around to understand Unity itself?