[pridkett]

Maybe - if you're just looking at keypress to character on screen. But you're missing a ton of other advancements - higher resolution screens, better colors for syntax highlighting, intellisense, robust debugging, and, of course, access to the internet for help that you need. Back in the day I had a printed copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List that I just had to muck with and pray I got it to work without hanging my computer. With this if it hangs, no big deal.

So, yes, the raw response rate from key press to phosphors being illuminated on the screen might be less, but the overall productivity of a developer is probably and order of magnitude more.

Then again, I did learn to program from the online help in Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++, so maybe there's something to those systems.