Past vs Present Programming

As other posters have said, I think there is somewhat too much nostalgia about how "easy" it was in the old days. I was reading about software dev in the 70s and it took like 4 years to write what we could do in a day today.Also, I think that relatively, we are still in the early days of software where lots of people are clamouring to invent the silver bullet to make it all work better, but after a bit longer, we will have more experience of what works and doesn't work and we w

I’m a software engineer.Due to the tools becoming better, I already had to unlearn a few skills. For instance, 20 years ago we had to write things like ( x >> 4 ) instead of ( x / 16 ), or use tricky fixed-point math instead of floats. Both were performance optimizations: compilers were less than brilliant (modern ones are reliably optimizing integer divisions into these bitwise tricks), and CPUs were much slower (modern processors are faster at multiplying or dividing floats than

Isn't the OP describing the world as the older generation wanted it to be? If you had asked some programming luminaries in the early 80s what they expected from programming 30 years later, they would have said "it will be more abstract, higher-level, with less direct knowledge of the underlying hardware required. Software should be write-once run-anywhere and shouldn't require arcane knowledge of the lower levels of the stack, and this will be a good thing." Well, guess what, here we a

Lots of good comments in here. I will chime in with the observation that: we've made a lot of progress. To be a programmer 30 years ago is totally different from today. The tooling is better, more approachable, more abstract and less technical.Will we ever be without code? Doubtful. Things will evolve and improve, but the only visions sold of no longer having code is in the sales pitches of products.

This feels, unrealistic. Coding practices, tools and technology have minimally changed since the 70's.Faster machines, but with each new language, you still have the baggage of design/code/compile/test/debug/refactor and the library/dependency hell that plagues things like oh, say Node.js with NPM, maven with Java, make with C/C++ etc. etc.Then there is the flood of new "UI hotness libraries" in the JavaScript space alone. Pick one. wait 6

There is a nice saying in german: "In former times everything was better, even the future!"I think software development and UX have improved a lot in the last decades. Build tools are sometimes really annoying, but does anyone remember how life was without them? Does anyone want to pull a GB of libs from the web by hand? (Obviously nobody would do that and prefer to reinvent the wheel with help of the "XY Cookbook"). The author also criticises "flat UI", but does

I've been programming professionally since about 1994, using C++, Java, Scheme, Python, Go, JavaScript and friends.Today, tools are incredibly better; compilers, debuggers, profilers. I'll take something from JetBrains or Visual Studio any day over what I had available in the 1990's. There were some gems back then, but today, tools are uniformly good.What has gotten difficult is the complexity of the systems which we build. Say I'm building a simple web app in JS with a

I developed software in the 80's but it was similar as it is today. Not much has changed. Books/co-worker talks/seminars became Stackoverflow. But programming languages in those days look the same as the ones we have now.Developing agile as is done today is better though.

I dont think it is anything about Smartphone. It is about the software / technology today, or Abstractions.In the 80s and 90s. One could still have a very high level understanding of every single part of the computer. From Hardware to Software. The whole stack.We now have a whole generation of programmers who dont understand a thing about Hardware. Not even enthusiast level. Nor do they understand anything beyond their domain within Software.The bar is also a lot higher, when basic

I can't relate to any of the "software sucks now" comments. I started off writing code the "old school" way. C or C++ using vanilla vim. I spent so much time wrestling with compile errors, pointer logic, memory management, looking up documentation to figure out what methods were available in a class, and using grep to figure out where/how methods were calling one another. It was a colossal mess. I had almost no interest in programming because I spent the vast majori