[narag]

" I think it's fair to say that a good programmer in 2015 is probably 10x more productive than a good programmer in 1995."

I don't know about fairness, but definitively that's wrong. I was around then and the most I could believe is that we are 2x.

[elihu]

I think it depends on what you're doing, and what counts as productivity. I think lines of code per developer per day haven't gone up much, but it's a lot easier to deliver much more complex products now than it was then, in part due to the large volume of readily accessible library code. There's less need to write special-purpose code for everything, because someone probably wrote the generic parts already.

There are some software domains that haven't changed much at all since the 90s or earlier. Systems programming is still done largely in C and C++, and modern kernels work basically the same way they did then with a few minor differences. Scripting has changed dramatically, web frameworks have changed dramatically, business applications have changed quite a bit. C# is noticeably different from Java, which is different from C++ or Cobol or whatever it was people used to write business software in back then.