I am ambivalent about your assertion. Developers can do much more while knowing much less than in the past, a lot of complicated details that could not be ignor

I am ambivalent about your assertion. Developers can do much more while knowing much less than in the past, a lot of complicated details that could not be ignored in the past are out of sight and out of mind. However, from a systems engineering view, our software is deeply and vastly more complicated than it used to be. We routinely use software today that had no complexity equivalent in the 1990s. No one wrote software in the 1990s like the advanced software we write today, it is qualitatively different. I think that perspective is lost on a lot of people that are not as old as I am. That increase in complexity is a serious barrier to understanding. The state-of-the-art today requires cognitive abilities that are much higher than they used to be. Hell, it is why C used to be an adequate language for most tasks.