The silver lining of IT evolution

I have been lamenting a lot about how "progress" of computers in last decade benefits millions of computer-illiterate at expense of tens thousands of programmers, system administrators and power users. But to be fair, we get some breadcrumbs too.

Huge and cheap disk storage

These days disk storage is very cheap, like $60 for external 1Tb SSD disk. What it means more opportunities for offline workflows.

I recently rsync'ed both MELPA and GNU ELPA elpa archives, it netted merely 2Gb. I can probably clone git repository of every package, and I still will be under 25Gb. Source of every Debian package is merely 126Gb.

https://www.debian.org/mirror/size

Archived XML dump of whole StackExchange is 80Gb; archived dump of OpenStreetMap is 115Gb.

https://planet.openstreetmap.org

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

The only thing that comes to mind that is outside of the reach is full YouTube dump. It is really huge, and, strictly speaking, Google would not endorse.

Nix

Nix is a godsend as far as building software reproducibly is concerned as long as we have enough disk space to keep ten slighly different versions of toolchain in /nix/store. With cheap disks, we do.

Language Server Protocol

Before language server protocol, developer was essentially forced into dilemma -- either use crappy, resource-hungry editor with fancy autocompletion (Eclipse, Visual Studio) or use decent editor (Emacs/Vim) and sketchy autocompletion.

Now this is a thing of past. Both Vim and Emacs have LSP integration, and now we are no longer in "catching up" position, we are first-class users of language server API, on par with VSCode.