Programming Evolution

The other day I was talking to a friend about how programming has changed in the last 15 years. What used to be required (to be a decent programmer, anyway) was an extreme depth of knowledge. You had to really understand that hardware your apps were running on, and we used to make every effort to optimize for performance, and yes, size.



Fast forward 15 years...



Nowadays, the hardware has been largely abstracted away from most programmers (don't argue - I know there will always be a need for people to write device drivers, and I also understand that the Linux camp thinks they are 1337). It's no longer necessary to squeeze the most out of every byte because, quite frankly, there is plenty of memory and hard drive to spare.



We also have nice GUI development tools that provide slick WYSIWYG interfaces. What used to take hours of painstaking coding in a text editor can now be accomplished literally in minutes via drag-and-drop.



These things considered, is it easier to be a programmer now than it was 15 or so years ago? I don't think so. In fact, I think quite the opposite is true.



While we're not wasting time coding as much stuff by hand, and we don't need quiet the depth of knowledge about the hardware, the breadth of knowledge required to be a decent programmer has increased exponentially.



15 years ago we didn't have to worry about the Internet. Programmers these days not only need to know their core programming language (be it C#, C++, VB, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, or something else), they also need to understand the Internet. That means having an understanding of the network infrastructure itself, as well as the relevant protocols (TCP, IP, HTTP, FTP, etc).



We need to understand interoperability better than ever before, and we also have to have specific knowledge relative to the challenges of distributed computing. I won't even get into the different database options, and what developers need to know. Clearly, the number of areas in which we all really need to have some level of knowledge, if not specialization, is staggering.



All things considered, I think it's actually a little more difficult to be a modern day Software Engineer. Our predecessors may complain of punch cards, command-line compiling, and text-based development tools, but at least they had enough time to do the work without the tools we enjoy today. It'll be interesting to see how the field changes in the next 15 years.