The windows 95 user interface was 'inspired by' the NeXT user interface, and to some degree the Mac UI. Microsoft had a NeXT computer to copy off, even though they wouldn't develop for it.
There has been some discussion around this, and Lee Davison is no longer with us so that makes it more difficult. It appears from the source code that Lee's independent basic is highly based on Microsoft Basic. I'm sure it is no longer an issue, especially as Microsoft has provided a free license for Microsoft 6502 basic, but the licensing situation is not entirely clear.
I treat code quality, and readability, as one of the goals. The LLM can help with this and refactor code much quicker than a human. If I think the code is getting too complex I change over to architecture review and refactoring until I am happy with it.
There's a selfish case for the wealthy to care about this: rising tides lift all boats, including theirs. When the bottom 80% are struggling with housing insecurity and desperation, the consequences don't stay contained to poor neighbourhoods. San Francisco seems like a good example—the visible decline in public spaces, safety concerns, and urban decay affect everyone who lives there, regardless of income. The wealthy can insulate themselves to a degree, but they can't fully escape a deteriorating society. They'd be better off in a city where everyone has a baseline of stability.
In the US rich people have been separating themselves from the rest for a while now (gated communities is just the first stage of separation. Rich people would rather take a short flight than be stuck in traffic among the hoi polloi. Rich people are constantly surrounded by bodyguards)
So rich people do not care about the decaying infrastructure around them.
I think the US will end up like Brazil: rich people go from sky scrapers to sky scraper via helicopters, while the favelas surround the skyscrapers. The poor are kept in check in the favelas with the help of a brutal police force. BTW: Brazil is a democracy.
Software Development is much more than writing code. Writing code may have become 90% easier, but a lot of the other development tasks haven't appreciably changed due to AI, although that might come. So, for now at least the answer to the question posed in the headline is no.
An exception might be building something that is well specified in advance, maybe because it's a direct copy of existing software.
Commissions were different back then. I worked part time selling computers around 1990 and a little earlier, margin on computers was moving down, but was as high as 50%, I recall it moving down to 30% and stabilising there for a while. I don't remember software margins, but it could have been about the same. I used to get 50% of the margin as commission.
When I sold Windows 2.1 at Egghead Software, my spiff was an extra 30% for the first month as a promo. I always assumed that was a loss leader by Microsoft to push extra copies on release.
What sort of systems do you work on to require this kind of traffic volume? I've worked on one project that I'd consider relatively high volume (UK Post Office Horizon Online) and we were only targeting 500 TPS.
It's the misuse of OO constructs that gives it a bad name, almost always that is inheritance being overused/misused. Encapsulation and modularity are important for larger code bases, and polymorphism is useful for making code simpler, smaller and more understandable.
Maybe the extra long names in java also don't help too, along with the overuse/forced use of patterns? At least it's not Hungarian notation.
Heck, I love the long names. I know, I also hate FooBarSpecializedFactory, but that's waaaay better than FBSpecFac.
A sample: pandas loc, iloc etc. Or Haskell scanl1. Or Scheme's cdr and car. (I know - most of the latest examples are common functions that you'll learn after a while, but still, reading it at first is terrible).
My first contact with a modern OO language was C# after years of C++. And I remember how I thought it awkward that the codebase looked like everything was spelled out. Until I realize that it is easier to read, and that's the main quality for a codebase.
It's likely that is is mostly just the standard Microsoft Basic with some modified I/O routines. Since Microsoft Basic is now under the MIT license you are free to modify the code, it may be relatively easy to re-implement the I/O routines and have a legal 'recreation' of the P2305 cartridge.
This particular machine is Z80 based and not 6502, so it's not trivial to port.
I've looked into building my own BASIC implementation and got quite far with that. Unfortunately, most games that were written back then rely on timing that is near impossible to recreate at that level. Emulating cycle exact Z80 behavior and then having the original BASIC routines on top of that is a far easier route.
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