The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80s

Mid-late 80's. A young, precocious kid spending summers at the library on their Commodore 64 creating text adventures set in Tolkien-esque vignettes. A well-worn book of BASIC exercises and puzzles at his side for reference.

Early 90's. The young teenager pilfers another Turbo-C demo disk from a thick book on the discount table at the back of the bookstore. His last demo ran out of time and he can't continue work on his game without it. He can't afford the software license. He logs onto the local BBS when he gets home and reads about something called, 'Mode-X'. Mind blown.

Late 90's. He drops out of high school to write Perl for a living. He makes a bigger salary than either of his parents ever did. More than his peers who were flipping burgers for minimum wage. He writes scripts to generate a website from his journal log files and shares it with his, "other friends." The ones who know the right incantations to make computers do things beyond playing video games or listening to music.

I wasn't a professional programmer at the time by a long stretch but I do remember having to figure most things out for myself. I caught the tail-end of the mid-80's craze to teach every kid how to program in BASIC. As a lone geek in astronomy club and pilfering his fathers' textbooks on classical mechanics I knew that computers were for programming and that was how you made computer games. I don't think I would've understood trigonometry or linear algebra any other way.

It's amazing how much the Internet has changed absolutely everything. Somewhere between 1999 - 2007 when persistent, high-speed access became the new normal programming changed. CPAN was a big deal and a huge tool... that idea caught on like wildfire. Now every language has a package manager and you can hardly start getting anything done without downloading a hundred or so megabytes of source code first. Learning has changed completely. We forget as easily as we discover since the knowledge is persisted for us. Learning about Duff's Device was a huge step for me... now I work with programmers who don't even know what the size of an integer is (a silly question of course... but totally unaware of how such a construct is implemented in the machine) and they do great work and provide immense value. Yet they couldn't construct a binary tree or heap if they needed to; the default is to, "just google it."

Yet when push-comes-to-shove I still find that sometimes forgetting all of that lets you get real, productive work done. Analysis, paralysis is a real problem in the face of an abundance of choice. Especially when there's not a clear "match" to your requirements. Sometimes it's just easier to solve the problem with your own solution that fits your use case.

One big thing is you never even knew what you didn't know. I had a C=64 for years and never even heard of the PEEK and POKE commands until years later when I was reading about it on the web. There were no computer experts to talk to back then, at least not where I lived. If it wasn't in the book or discoverable from just fiddling you weren't likely to find it.

The worst part for me is that my library had a computer section, but it was filled with stuff like "FORTRAN for System/360". Apparently the library decided that they had enough computer books and didn't bother getting new ones.

But doctors don't.

Biggest difference between coding in the 80's vs. now:

Then: memory and CPU cycles were not cheap

Now: everything is multithreaded and often asynchronous

There was actually a web page that would answer your stack overflow answer by running and benchmarking all of them.

There was also a plugin that would allow you to directly grab code from stack overflow and put it right into your project, kinda of like a search engine for laziness (I think it was an Atom plugin)