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by throwaway201103 2018 days ago
When I think about 1990, I was still using unix, I was still using emacs to write code, was still writing SQL to work with relational databases. Sure the web wasn't really a thing yet, but all the fundamentals were there. The concept wasn't new; we had hypertext and interconnected networks. I don't know enough about deep learning to say whether the concepts were unknown then or just waiting on computing speed to catch up. AI research was certainly well underway long before 1990.

At least for the work I do, I don't think much has fundamentally changed since 1990. Convenience and speed is way higher, yes. Storage and processing power is immensely cheaper. And obviously we've got 30 more years of development of things we can build upon. But I think if a good developer from 1990 could be teleported to today, he'd be productive with today's technology in short order.
1 comments
oblio 2018 days ago
That minimizes all the building blocks we've built meanwhile.

The human writing the code will write about as much code today as they wrote in 1990, true. But as I commented elsewhere, the building blocks we have now would boggle the mind of a developer in 1990.

We have complete game engines, with scripting languages included, physics, advanced graphics and a myriad of things I don't even know, that you can actually use for free now.

We have maps that cover the world, with distance estimations, navigation instructions, street views of every street, etc., that a 12 year old can integrate on their website.

A developer in 1990 would be very productive today, yes. But that's because of everything that has been build in these 30 years. With the tools he had in 1990, his output would be meager by modern standards.

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username90 2018 days ago
People didn't have the modern tools easily creating very slow programs 30 years ago, but I'd argue that it was because those tools weren't useful to them since their programs had the requirement that they need to run on machines with 10 mhz processors (with way less work done per cycle, no branch prediction etc). So most of those "productivity enhancements" comes from hardware being so fast that you no longer have to care about things.

And no, a game engine like Unreal isn't performant, it wastes a ton of ram and cpu on bookkeeping. It is a small fraction of a modern computer but back then you'd rather have all the resources instead of wasting a huge amount of them.

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