Even the languages that were painful in the 1990s have gotten better. Some of it was the system libraries, some was just the lack of experience in API design, s

Even the languages that were painful in the 1990s have gotten better. Some of it was the system libraries, some was just the lack of experience in API design, some was just a lack of awareness that better was even possible. While I don't like C++ at all, certainly C++ in 2023 is a lot more tolerable than C++ in 1997. I learned programming in the late 1990s. Looking at Windows programming at the time looking like gibberish to me and I looked forward to the day I would understand it. Honestly, it still looks like gibberish to me. I understand the whys and the wherefores better now and if I had no choice, yeah, I could learn it and write it, but the code from that still reads absolutely awfully to me, just unbelievably bad by almost every modern standard. Even when you're writing approximately equivalent code in C# at the same low level of acquiring handles and manipulating them with very low level APIs, it's just so much better now.