I thing the big difference is that software is gradually becoming more declarative. It's less about coding how it does things, more about coding what it is doin

I thing the big difference is that software is gradually becoming more declarative. It's less about coding how it does things, more about coding what it is doing. This has been the flow for many decades, but it's more common now than 5 years ago. Something like React is the norm now. It's not necessarily any simpler or faster, but it's more efficient past N hours, which is the case for many larger companies. It's also why functional programming has regained popularity, or at least writing functions the way you would for functional (immutable, output of one is the input of another). However, we're still using a lot of old techniques. The best book on Design Patterns was written in 1997. Pragmatic Programmer was written in 1999 (though revisited a few years ago). The best TDD book is still from 2002; a lot of modern takes on TDD gets the philosophy completely wrong. TDD was meant to reduce fear, not improve test coverage.