[mattbrewsbytes]

The big changes are in the frameworks/libraries, collaboration tools, information availability and pure computational power. All the other stuff is the same really. Agile and waterfall are still being used, client, mobile and web are still used, mainframe too.

From my perspective it is the collaboration and depth of answers you can find online now. When I was programming 20 years ago I was in college and "the web" really didn't exist - there was email and networks, etc. but web browsing hadn't really begun mainstream yet. When I needed to learn something I had to find a book on it or actually attend a class - like programming EJB's in J2EE.

An example about frameworks/libraries: building web applications was very different since you had Netscape and IE (v4) supporting different and overlapping HTML, CSS and JS features. MVC and all the frameworks out now were really in their infancy or didn't exist 20 years ago. I was doing CGI scripts with Perl for some apps and there was a lot of heavy lifting compared to today.

Today you can probably have a scaffold/basic application (thinking in Rails) that is OS and device independent with something like bootstrap, running on a VM, on the internet in about a hour. So it's much quicker to get to the point where you start adding value rather then spending enormous amounts of time on basic infrastructure.