(I’m thinking across a span of about 20 years.) We have moved up one or two levels of abstraction. It is now not only possible to perform complex tasks in scr

(I’m thinking across a span of about 20 years.) We have moved up one or two levels of abstraction. It is now not only possible to perform complex tasks in scripting/shell environments but easy to do so (huge standard libraries, etc.), and code written at a high level is now “fast enough” in most cases. Also, the nature of those tasks has gone up a level or two; networking, for instance, is no longer a neat feature and is more like a core competency for a language. We’ve spent a long time on parallel processing and finally have some pretty neat constructs for doing so (in mainstream languages and not just side projects). Well overdue, and it leads to more natural coding in a lot of cases. We have a more “international” coding environment. It is far more common now to see at least a preference for stuff like UTF-8, if not full support for it. We’ve successfully open-sourced certain tools that are critical to development. For instance, nowadays you don’t really expect to pay money for a compiler, and you probably are using an open-source revision control system (though some proprietary ones still exist). Generally, there is a greater expectation that a community of some sort will exist around crucial infrastructure tools. Hardware, obviously, is way better. Unfortunately, while this has clearly allowed for some incredible advances, it has also enabled extremely sloppy coding. There seem to be massive amounts of memory allocated and other “features” of some modern programs, and they work only because so many people have over a gigabyte of RAM to make up for it.