In the 1980s a spell-checker was a very complicated project and now it's simply a hashmap lookup. But it's not because we invented the hashmap since then, or no

In the 1980s a spell-checker was a very complicated project and now it's simply a hashmap lookup. But it's not because we invented the hashmap since then, or nobody in the 80s would have known that, it just wasn't possible with the RAM limitations at the time. Likewise, moving from ASM to C to Smalltalk is a night-and-day improvement... that we made in the 1970s. The difference again is what hardware we get to run it on. Video game construction kits existed in the 80s, and 80s GUIs looked pretty much the same as they do now if you ignore resolution. Drag and drop application development was huge in the 90s, and the CRUD applications of the time weren't significantly different than now, other than they didn't run in a browser. HTTPS wasn't hard back then, and you could write a Perl endpoint in half an hour easy. When it comes to things like playing video, it's easy now but I don't even really consider it programming. You're just installing software that does it for you. Libraries and OSS and StackOverflow and various services have made a real difference. I'm not arguing that we haven't made progress. I'm just saying that I can see how some people feel that this year's incremental advance or retreat is not nearly as exciting if they've seen how the last 20 worked out.