Even the early assembly coders of the 60s would be hard pressed to imagine the life of a modern coder working in an IDE. That has nothing to do with changes in

Even the early assembly coders of the 60s would be hard pressed to imagine the life of a modern coder working in an IDE. That has nothing to do with changes in the task of coding. It has to do with changes in the relative popularity of various programming styles. As witnessed by this sentence of yours: Many of these notions also seem to fit comfortably in LISP That's probably true, but you're talking about a language which was invented in 1958 and implemented in the early 1960s. The Lisp hackers had the equivalent of IDEs and modern programming environments in the 1970s, if not before. They are not especially impressed by our modern programming tools. (And many of us actually prefer to do our programming using tools descended from theirs, like emacs.) Even the old Lisp hands who helped invent (e.g.) Java are not particularly impressed. As Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec and former author of the Common Lisp spec, famously said of Java: "We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." The outer surface of programming has changed a lot over the last fifty years, and Moore's Law, the buildout of our infrastructure, the increasing sophistication of computer users, and the general growth in the population of programmers has changed the nature of the problem space many times, but the essence of the task hasn't really changed all that much. You can learn surprisingly relevant things by reading papers and books from the 1960s.