30 years ago in 1992 I was working mostly with C for Acorn RISC OS machines, assembler for ARM processors (RISC OS and embedded) and various other assemblers fo

30 years ago in 1992 I was working mostly with C for Acorn RISC OS machines, assembler for ARM processors (RISC OS and embedded) and various other assemblers for Z80, 64180, 8052 for embedded work (no C). For a general purpose glue language I used BBC Basic which came with RISC OS which was a fine language. You could also embed ARM assembler in it to make it run faster. I wrote 100k lines or more of assembler in those years! ARM assembler in particular is so nice - I miss it sometimes. My main development machine was an RISC OS machine with a 20 MB hard disk (which crashed the day after I got it - glad I made backups on floppy disks!). Back then I would make printouts of programs to refer to on tractor fed dot matrix paper. The idea of printing a program seems very old fashioned now! My editor of choice was called !Zap which was like someone ported the essence of emacs to RISC OS. It wasn't until 1998 that I used actual emacs and felt immediately at home. I had lots of reference books. The giant programmers reference manual for RISC OS, and dozens of CPU manuals (if you asked the chip manufacturers nicely they would send you a datasheet for free, which was usually more like a book). I had a few books on C but I didn't consult those much as C is easy to keep entirely in your head. As for process, and design principles - they could be summed up as "Get the job done!". I had very little oversight on my work and as long as it worked it was up to me how to make it work. Compensation was excellent, programmers were in demand. So much so that I set up my own business. Computers have got so much faster since then, but it doesn't affect the job of programming much - it is still the meat component that is the limiting factor. The internet (which I didn't get access to until 1993) has completely changed programming though. So easy to look something up, whether that is the arguments to memcpy or an algorithm for searching strings. It wasn't until the internet that the open source movement really took off - distribution was a real problem before then. I used to download open source/freeware/shareware from BBS or get it from disks on magazine covers. Having access to high quality open source libraries has made programming much better. No longer do I have to write a bug ridden version of binary searching / quicksort / red-black trees - I can just use one from a library or bundled with my language of choice. Not having to write everything in C / Assembler is a bonus too! I didn't meet Perl until 1998 and then it was transformative. I soon moved onto python which I still use a lot as my general purpose glue language. I'm a big Go fan, it seems like C without the hard parts, with concurrency and a massive standard library. Are things better now? Mostly I think, though there is often far too much ceremony to get stuff done (here's looking at you Javascript ecosystem!). Programmers in 2022 have to build less of the foundations themselves which makes life easier, but it takes away some of the enjoyment too.