I've been coding since the mid/late 80s and whilst I do sometimes look back fondly on how much we managed to wring out of the underpowered tech we had then, I d

I've been coding since the mid/late 80s and whilst I do sometimes look back fondly on how much we managed to wring out of the underpowered tech we had then, I don't miss the amount of time and effort it took us to achieve it. Back in the day, I spent weeks writing a basic DOS-based windowing framework for one of my applications. Today, an equivalent (well, vastly more powerful) framework comes out of the box with 3 clicks of the "create a new app" wizard on just about every platform out there. I also spent weeks, if not months, fine-tuning my apps so that they would run at a sensible speed on the hardware we had, would fit into the 500K or so of RAM that was available, and would pretty much never crash as issuing a patch involved me manually copying hundreds of floppy disks and posting them to clients. Modern hardware/OSs/languages may be far less efficient in their use of CPU/memory etc, but they allow me to be far more efficient in the use of my time to deliver actual functionality to users.