[AnimalMuppet]

LOL. Nailed it.

But some things are quite different in the last 40 years. The standard libraries are much better. If I need a map, I don't have to implement a map; I just use the one in the standard library unless there's good reason not to. The amount of code that I don't have to write, but can still use, has gone way up.

Debugging tools are better. Code sanitization tools are better. Unit testing tools are better. Type checking is better (for statically typed languages).

Oh, yeah, and the monitors these days don't bathe you in soft x-rays.

Those may not be the same level of change as moving from octal to assemblers to compilers with punched cards to terminals with monitors, but they still add up to a significant amount of change.

[trhr]

My parents have a photo of me from the mid-90s on their fridge; I'm shirtless, sitting at a computer, working in an IDE.

Not that much has changed. Sometimes I put on a bathrobe for Zoom calls now.

[mianos]

Yes everything is better. I like the way languages like python have dicts completely built in and in modern C++ maps are almost as native.

The amount of code that needs to be done is the same it just does a lot more.

I started in 8085 assembly language. Everything had to be done from scratch. It was still similar; see a problem, work out how to solve it, write it and debug it.

It is certainly much better now. I am not sure about debugging. There were years at a time when I only used IDE based debuggers, but now, with much more containerisation I probably do as much visual code inspection to solve issues as I ever did.