I didn't see anybody mention compile times. Today, it is instant -- click to run. My first programming job - our product was a CAD package for Windows 2.1 and

I didn't see anybody mention compile times. Today, it is instant -- click to run. My first programming job - our product was a CAD package for Windows 2.1 and the new v3.0 beta. It took 9 hours to do a full recompile on our fastest computer, a fancy new 486dx-33 with 8MB of RAM! NINE HOURS TO COMPILE. Now I get impatient if it takes more than 15 seconds to compile, build the firmware image, download it to hardware and reboot. It's a different world, for sure. I think it makes us a little careless. The approach to coding is different. THEN there was a huge penalty to break the build, and we tended to think through a solution very carefully before implementing it. Now, I'll confess, I'm just as likely to plug in some magic numbers and see what happens, or set a breakpoint down in the guts of some heavy code and see what's happening as I am to very carefully think through all the permutations and be sure of everything before hitting Go.