As programmers...have we come a long way since 1993?

From: gswork (gswork_at_mailcity.com)
Date: 10/07/03 

Date: 7 Oct 2003 06:23:37 -0700

Just thinking on the DOS thread...

Typical PC programmers 10 years ago were focussed on DOS, interrupts,
C with assembly snippets, 16 bits, VGA and other direct hardware
access, fretting over DPMI and 64kb limits. Hobbyists used QBasic or
bought Turbo Pascal...

'New' things, were event driven GUI apps, Win16API, OOP and C++, the
GDI for graphics, Multimedia and a hint of email/internet.

Ok, so some of that goes way back... but were not typical of '93.

Now, it's all very OOP, very structured framework GUI, RAD/STL
approaches, DirectX/OpenGL and other big media libraries, 32 bit
memory models, reliance on the capacity of the machine to handle it
all and heaps of Internet - even a simple calculator has be internet
ready! Hobbyists use Windows and Linux and have more compilers than a
pro did in '93!

'New' things are VM's and their languages (well, java is mid '90s,
.NET is newer) plus the increasing distance from the machine and such
things as Win32API, and being internet enabled isn't enough - it has
to interact with your cell phone and your neighbours microwave oven
too!

yet underneath much is the same. I find so much older code to still
be very useful: algorithms and data structures, to be essentially the
same (and they go back further than '93 of course!).

Perhaps the main differences i see commonly are huge increases in C++
and OOP code compared to C dominated early-mid 90's. Projects seem to
be so much larger in size and scope. Freeware and OSS is much more
prevalent, enabled by the net. There's so much more choice in how
you can implement a program.

aah... i'm just rambling really...!

We must have come along way, musn't we?