The grandparent wasn't claiming that the 80s were as good as us, he's claiming that just the passage of time is a bad reason to forget a lesson. You mention a

The grandparent wasn't claiming that the 80s were as good as us, he's claiming that just the passage of time is a bad reason to forget a lesson. You mention a long list of rules and practices, but I'm not sure they've had as unadulterated a benefit as you think. Replacing GOTOs with objects has more often than not resulted in a more structured form of spaghetti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo-yo_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo-yo_problem, for example) that's no better. There were already people programming with closures and anonymous types, there's just more of them now. That's probably better, but not night-and-day. Lots of people still write spaghetti with closures and callbacks. Arguing about whether the past is better or the present is better is a waste of time. We're just trading generalities at this point about a topic that permits no easy generalization. One way I've been trying to avoid this trap is with the mantra (generality :), "languages don't suck, codebases suck." It forces me to remember that it's possible to write good code in a bad language, and (often) to write bad code in a good language. Intangible abilities, domain properties, accidental design decisions and cultural factors have a huge effect that it's easy to ignore and underestimate by clinging to reassuring rules about the parts that seem more tangible. But you won't grow until you try to stare into the abyss. (Edit: By 'you' in that last sentence I didn't mean you specifically, mattmanser.)