I’ve been working in software engineering for 30+ years so I can say that yes, things are definitely much easier. Debugger in the 80s/90s were finicky beasts th

I’ve been working in software engineering for 30+ years so I can say that yes, things are definitely much easier. Debugger in the 80s/90s were finicky beasts that were shrouded in esoterica and as a result, it was usually much easier to try to debug code by adding print statements than it was to actually use a debugger. I’m still somewhat amazed by the capabilities of contemporary debuggers. Libraries outside those provided by the OS/compiler tended to be hard to come by. Certainly the universe of freely available library code that we have now was nonexistent (I’d argue that CPAN was a big factor in the spread of Perl in the 90s—well, that an the assumption that was widespread back then that CGI scripts had to be written in Perl). As a community, we’ve collectively learned a lot of important lessons as well. Legacy systems like Perl and LaTeX tend to install common code in a single universal directory for everyone rather than having this be application/document specific as became the case with Java and the repositories will only give you the latest version of an artifact¹ which has tended to lead to stagnation since backwards compatibility becomes non-negotiable, although some lessons haven’t stuck (like the fact that Rust’s crates.io only has a single-level namespace for artifacts). ⸻ 1. Not sure if this is absolutely the case with CPAN. CTAN, which was quite possibly the first centralized repo² does not manage multiple versions of artifacts. 2. I remember when it was first being set up, since there was no guarantee that any tooling beyond TeX would be available to consumers, there being TeX scripts to do things like encode/decode binary files into emailable ASCII format. The original CTAN FTP server in the UK also had the remarkable feature that it would generate directory.zip for any directory that you requested.