[CM30]

Part of me says "of course we learn, look at how many bad practices are at least significantly less common than they were in the olden days". It's quite rare you come across a decently run tech company or team that doesn't use version control, or makes changes live in production without a testing environment, or doesn't use automated tests at all, or doesn't have a deploy process at all beyond 'use FTP'.

10-20 years ago that wasn't really the case, and such practices were much rarer even in more tech savvy teams and organisations.

Same with web development related stuff. People aren't using tables for layout anymore, nor are things like accessibility some sort of completely ignored concept that no one takes seriously. And people do actually use CSS for layout purposes rather than font tags and spacer images and whatever else the days of Geocities style web development had in store.

So it's definitely advanced in many areas.

[mikewarot]

In the 1980s, GIT didn't exist, and CVS was a complicated thing that Unix people used, so I didn't have "proper" version control. I did, however, have a stash of ZIP files of increasing sequence number on floppy disks.

In the 1990s, We used FTP to send files to web servers because we didn't have WebDAV or any more secure protocols at the time. We used tables because that is what we had.

We had fewer tools than today, it really doesn't amount to any learning, just better tool availability. Knowledge itself seems to have stayed about the same.

[markmaglana]

...but aren't those tools a representation of the additional knowledge that the industry accumulated over time?

[jjav]

> 10-20 years ago that wasn't really the case

To state the obvious, 10 years ago was 2012. Absolutely all of the things you list were standard practice. 20 years ago was 2002, also same thing (no, git didn't invent version control).

30 years ago I was using version control at my first job, it was expected practice. As was having test coverage. None of these things are new.

Deployment was different, granted. We didn't "deploy to production", we shipped a box of floppies to users.