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What other trends do you see?
The largest change I've noticed is the level of accessibility that programming has now. When I got started there were "Web Designers" who worked mostly in Photoshop and static HTML, and there were "programmers" who did something else, on special machines, with special training, but it was completely beyond the grasp of us mere mortals.
Nowadays programming is not something you need a degree or certification for, it's not something you need rigorous training for, or special equipment for, it's just something you can pick up if you feel like it (and get a taste for with little commitment or money or time spent). That's a huge change to me, and I think it's for the best. In this decade, we're seeing the definition of "literacy" expand, to include things like reading and writing programming languages...which is awesome!
I can't speak on the whole 20 years (I've only been in the industry for 12 years). But, at any rate: The largest change I've noticed is the level of accessibility that programming has now. When I got started there were "Web Designers" who worked mostly in Photoshop and static HTML, and there were "programmers" who did something else, on special machines, with special training, but it was completely beyond the grasp o…
I believe this is true since the 80's with cheap PCs running Basic, Pascal, etc.
Two years later I was rocking with Project Builder, which came with OS X Public Beta - at no extra cost! I credit the release of OS X, and the huge usability advances in Linux, for making the GNU toolset accessible to hobbyists and students. This barrier lowering is what enabled the Cambrian Explosion of programming languages we enjoy today.
1: http://www.macworld.com/article/1014313/19reviewscodewarrior...
Databases for web services used to really suck back in the 1995/2000 time frame. They were either difficult to use, or very expensive. MySQL gradually killed the bottom 2/3 of the commercial database market between ~1998 and ~2005 or so.
Simple interactivity on sites is incredibly easy now. Applets and Shockwave were horrible, due to performance issues (systems and browsers), general bugginess, and lack of consistent support.
RAM and storage used to be really, really expensive. When Excite wanted to test out how well the first version of their search engine could scale, they paid $10,000 for a 10gb hard drive (purchased by Vinod Khosla).
Using, controlling and embedding media on sites is almost an afterthought now, it's so easy. Real Media was satan.
Search was really bad until Google put AltaVista & Co out of their misery. Search spam ruled the day. The notion of just punching in a problem and finding a solution on Stack Overflow, ha.
Ten years ago, 20-50kb still mattered when loading a site. Developers no longer need to obsess about the size of their site assets (rather, more on how many and latency), unless they're getting really crazy about it.
Language options are so much better today than in 1995/2000. You can now choose from numerous good options, pick whichever one works best for you, and you can be confident that so long as you use it optimally, you're unlikely to run into big problems unless you're dealing with hyper scale services.
Collaboration capabilities are... well, drastically better now. Github, Slack, really easy and cheap video conferencing, large file storage & sharing, sites like Stack Exchange, social networks, and so on.
Bandwidth is dirt cheap; that doesn't really need an elaboration.
The countless cloud services have made prototyping / testing super cheap.
The rise of the internet service API, following fairly standardized approaches, has made interfacing with vast amounts of data very easy, very precise and very cheap.
I can't speak on the whole 20 years (I've only been in the industry for 12 years). But, at any rate: The largest change I've noticed is the level of accessibility that programming has now. When I got started there were "Web Designers" who worked mostly in Photoshop and static HTML, and there were "programmers" who did something else, on special machines, with special training, but it was completely beyond the grasp o…
> Nowadays programming is not something you need a degree or certification for, it's not something you need rigorous training for, or special equipment for, it's just something you can pick up if you feel like it I believe this is true since the 80's with cheap PCs running Basic, Pascal, etc.
Back in the 80s and 90s, knowledge about how to become a programmer was easily available as long as you were willing to spring for books and a computer, but the only building blocks you had available were whatever was in the Mac Toolbox ROM, the Win32 API, or the POSIX standard. Beyond that, you were basically working directly with the bits and bytes on the machine. So yes, anyone could become a programmer, but you didn't get very far unless you could plan and execute an immensely complex web of algorithms and data structures.
There are still some problems like that (eg. if you work for Dropbox, Google Search, or Galois), but most programming these days involves assembling building blocks. You have scripting languages like Python or JS to take the pain away from memory allocation and working with raw memory layouts. You have GUI frameworks like web browsers, Android, Cocoa, or .NET to build UIs without worrying about vector graphics. You have serialization protocols like JSON, protobufs, Cap'n Proto, MessagePack, Thrift, etc. so you can just dump your data structures to the wire; back in my first programming job in 2000, I remember a significant amount of effort being figuring out which bytes would go over the wire and how they would be formatted. You have packaging managers like NPM or PyPI with tens of thousands of packages for the picking.
That's changed the job description of a programmer significantly. It involves a lot more memorization these days, a lot more lookup skills, and a lot less mathematical & logical ability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nowadays programming is not something you need a degree or certification for, it's not something you need rigorous training for, or special equipment for, it's just something you can pick up if you feel like it I believe this is true since the 80's with cheap PCs running Basic, Pascal, etc.
What's changed is the huge corpus of well-documented open-source software now available. Back in the 80s and 90s, knowledge about how to become a programmer was easily available as long as you were willing to spring for books and a computer, but the only building blocks you had available were whatever was in the Mac Toolbox ROM, the Win32 API, or the POSIX standard. Beyond that, you were basically working directly wi…