[MalcolmDiggs]

I can't speak on the whole 20 years (I've only been in the industry for 12 years). But, at any rate:

The largest change I've noticed is the level of accessibility that programming has now. When I got started there were "Web Designers" who worked mostly in Photoshop and static HTML, and there were "programmers" who did something else, on special machines, with special training, but it was completely beyond the grasp of us mere mortals.

Nowadays programming is not something you need a degree or certification for, it's not something you need rigorous training for, or special equipment for, it's just something you can pick up if you feel like it (and get a taste for with little commitment or money or time spent). That's a huge change to me, and I think it's for the best. In this decade, we're seeing the definition of "literacy" expand, to include things like reading and writing programming languages...which is awesome!

[hcarvalhoalves]

> Nowadays programming is not something you need a degree or certification for, it's not something you need rigorous training for, or special equipment for, it's just something you can pick up if you feel like it

I believe this is true since the 80's with cheap PCs running Basic, Pascal, etc.

[nostrademons]

What's changed is the huge corpus of well-documented open-source software now available.

Back in the 80s and 90s, knowledge about how to become a programmer was easily available as long as you were willing to spring for books and a computer, but the only building blocks you had available were whatever was in the Mac Toolbox ROM, the Win32 API, or the POSIX standard. Beyond that, you were basically working directly with the bits and bytes on the machine. So yes, anyone could become a programmer, but you didn't get very far unless you could plan and execute an immensely complex web of algorithms and data structures.

There are still some problems like that (eg. if you work for Dropbox, Google Search, or Galois), but most programming these days involves assembling building blocks. You have scripting languages like Python or JS to take the pain away from memory allocation and working with raw memory layouts. You have GUI frameworks like web browsers, Android, Cocoa, or .NET to build UIs without worrying about vector graphics. You have serialization protocols like JSON, protobufs, Cap'n Proto, MessagePack, Thrift, etc. so you can just dump your data structures to the wire; back in my first programming job in 2000, I remember a significant amount of effort being figuring out which bytes would go over the wire and how they would be formatted. You have packaging managers like NPM or PyPI with tens of thousands of packages for the picking.

That's changed the job description of a programmer significantly. It involves a lot more memorization these days, a lot more lookup skills, and a lot less mathematical & logical ability.

[sharemywin]

visual basic was real easy to use. As long as you didn't want to program a complex game.

[nostrademons]

My memory is hazy, but didn't VB not come out until the mid/late 90s? That was the era when "build it all yourself" began to die... Other systems from that vintage included COM, DHTML, Java, MFC, GNOME, KDE, wxwidgets, etc.

[bayonetz]

VB6 was at probably peak popularity mid/late 90s which is why you probably remember it as just coming out even though it had been out for a while. That's one thing that's certainly different - the rate of growth and hype for new languages and technologies. The literal and figurative network effects today obviously allow stuff the ability to get hot so much faster.

[dragonwriter]

> My memory is hazy, but didn't VB not come out until the mid/late 90s?

1991, actually.