[mingmecca]

Speaking as someone who cut my teeth in the 80s and early 90s: I miss the elitism and exclusivity of it. Nowadays the internet has made it so any question can be answered within seconds, but back then you had to scrupulously acquire your information from magazines, Usenet discussions, and just plain experimenting with the code. As things currently stand, programming has become a commodity skill that anyone with a room temperature IQ can learn within a reasonably small time frame. Then, you get on StackExchange and start cobbling together your app from copypasta provided by other programmers.

Things have been dumbed down considerably.

[DrScump]

  any question can be answered within seconds

Problem is, you can find dozens of mutually exclusive answers to any given question and hundreds of copies of each served by content farms.

In the Usenet days, you'd find a FAQ with answers curated by the combined reviews of dozens of participants over time.

[maxxxxx]

Yeah. In the 90s I met almost no computer scientists. We all came from different backgrounds and got into programming because we were interested and liked it. Now we have a lot of people who chose it as a well-paying career. Nothing wrong with that but it's less fun.

[gHosts]

I'm an applied mathematician that worked in those days with chemists, microbiologists, hydrologists, civil engineers, electronic engineers, physicists and almost every darn flavour of critter _except_ computer scientists.

Learnt a lot of interesting stuff.

Most of their code was utter shit to read and maintain... but then so is that from most recent comp sc graduates...

[lostmsu]

Well, you can always pick something, that is still complicated. Like distributed systems.

[fwip]

Kudos for honesty, I suppose.

[DrDonkey]

No doubt about it.