I am biased because I did drop out of high school, yadayada. My career has seen consistently a much steeper incline than nearly all CS graduates I've ever met. Plus, I got to build a bunch of useful and cool stuff, while others were wasting their time studying.

I think also a big problem of desktop apps is that you have to deal with window management. Now that I am on Niri it is really apparent to me how much I hated juggling windows in pretty much any other window manager that I ever used, except, interestingly enough, tmux.

What I hated most about Gradle is that groovy is untyped. You'd make a change and wait for your build to complete only to find out minutes later that you made a typo or some other innocuous mistake. Glad they introduced Kotlin DSL.

I didn't notice the breaking changes much when we heavily used gradle. Gradle also comes with gradlew, which bootstraps your gradle project with the exact gradle version that is needed to build that project, so you can take an old gradle project and build it regardless of all those breaking changes that you mention.

I don't say this, because I know how, but because I see no reason why we will be unable to crack that problem. If our brains can do it, so will AI one day.