> Yeah, let's remember everything that was great about 25 years ago and forget everything that sucked. Juxtapose it with everything that sucks about today but omit everything that's great. Come on man.

That's fair. When I see bad code today, and try to explain to myself what's bad about it, I realize that people totally did the same things 25 years ago.

Nowadays there is just so much more code, and we stand on taller piles of "architecture" trying to scale higher heaps of expectations. The thing is, the effect of the bad stuff seems to compound more readily than the effect of the good stuff. And meeting the demand for more code involves broadening the base of people doing the coding.

> If you think things suck now, just make it better! The world is your playground.

I agree with this. A lot of the modern expectation is artificial, emphasizing form over function. Even where it isn't, a lot of the modern technique is unnecessary cargo-culting. You can do a lot locally if you believe in your machine (https://thundergolfer.com/computers-are-fast ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucWdfZoxsYo).

For PAPER I'm targeting Python 3.6+ (where they added `pathlib.Path` and f-strings, and upgraded the SSL version) with the intent to support it indefinitely (which involves forking certain dependencies).