The changed in programming since the 80s

To me the modern Web is far and away the most important change in the day-to-day practice of programming since the 1980s.

Technically we had an Internet in the 1980s (and the Web was invented in 1989), but it was a different, and much less useful, beast. Back then a lot of critical technical documentation was only readily available in paper form, and if you didn’t happen to have it handy, tough luck. There was nothing like Stack Overflow, and the closest you could come to Googling an obscure error message was to ask on Usenet or a mailing list and hope someone would get around to answering you within a few days.

Today we all take it for granted that most of the technical questions we ask while we’re writing our code will be easily answered in so little time that it barely even interrupts our flow, and it’s unusual and frustrating when it takes more than a few minutes to find an answer.

There are other changes too.

The vast majority of programmers in 2018 spend approximately zero time thinking about memory management, while many 1988-era programmers spent a sizable portion of their time hunting down memory leaks or double-free bugs.

If you wanted to build a graphical user interface in 1982, you would spend a lot of time writing code to render it on the screen; now, unless you have very specific requirements, you just output high-level instructions in the form of HTML.

Tools like NPM and Maven, and their vast collections of freely-available libraries, have made the 1980s dream of an ecosystem of reusable software components largely come true, and reusable components cover a bunch of niches that used to be strictly roll-your-own-everything: if you are doing solo game development in 2018 you have your choice of several high-quality 3D engines and you don’t have to pay a dime up front.

But none of those things holds a candle to the impact of the Web.

>> Also you can read: How can you learn C and C++