Nothing Changes

2026-01-27T00:00:00.000Z

My cousin, my brother, and I admiring the Saturn V rocket at the Johnson Space Center in the summer of 1990.

It has been thirty years since I first started programming (twenty-two years of that professionally). It feels like surprisingly little has changed.

The Changes

These are the notable changes:

Move away from books for API documentation
Always-on internet connection
Flat-screen CRTs
Laptop Computers
Package managers (yum, maven, npm, etc)
DHTML (Web 2.0, fetch)
Virtualization and containers (vmware, docker)
4K monitors

Other than this, I don't know that things have changed all that much.

Books / Always-on Internet

When I first learned to program, it was 1995 and I was nine-years old. It was rare for anyone to have anything but dial-up, and even if you were on the internet, there wasn't much on it anyway. So if you wanted to know how to use a programming language or API, all you had was books. I distinctly remember big fat Addison Wesley API books. Just giant lists of API methods and how to use them.

The usenet forums were the only community online where you might get help with programming problems. My first email address was an @my-deja.com address, Deja News being the website giving easy access to the usenet forums.

Over time programming languages and major libraries gradually started hosting their documentation online. You no longer needed to have a book to learn anything new. With an always-on internet connection, there was zero friction to search for information.

Flat Screen CRT

Within a year or so after I started working professionally (2003), I very distinctly remember getting a flat-screen CRT monitor. It felt like the most amazing technology at the time. Oddly, I don't specifically remember when I first had an LCD monitor. The transition from a bubble CRT to flat CRT was a much more memorable change. The increase in usable desk surface with an LCD monitor is remarkable, but I still don't remember the change.

Laptop Computers

I know people had been using laptops even during the 1990s, but it feels like they only started becoming ubiquitous in the mid-2000s. With the laptop, bringing your work home and back was a much more fluid thing.

Package Managers

Back in my day I had to compile the kernel myself, uphill both ways, in the snow. I don't think I compiled a linux kernel more than once or twice, but I vividly remember the pain of chasing down rpm files for my platform (shout out to Mandrake Linux). You just want to install a simple tool, but it requires some dependency that you have to track down. Then you need to track down the dependency's dependency, etc, etc. While rpmfind.net was amazing, it didn't always have what you need.

The introduction of yum on RedHat-based distributions (and apt on debian) was a game-changer. Suddenly everything just worked! Even today some of the major operating systems still don't have this problem solved.

Not just for linux dependencies, but for programming, you can get any of your standard third-party libraries with simple package managers. Maven and the pom.xml or build.gradle, npm and package.json, golang and ... oh it just works! Package managers might be the single greatest time-saver that has come about in my career.

DHTML (Dynamic HTML) / Web 2.0

The internet as we know it today is basically DHTML. The introduction of XmlHttpRequest (later fetch) and the ubiquity of updating HTML pages with JavaScript without doing a new page load changed everything about the feel of the internet. Requiring a form-submission, back-button-breaking POSTs, and only server-side rendering made for a very static web experience.

Before we had the ability to make these dynamic data requests within the page itself, there was a hard limit to what kind of applications could be made and hosted as a web page. But I don't think there is any site on the internet today that couldn't be made with the technology of the era right after DHTML became available in all the browsers.

I'm sure there are newer CSS features and things like canvas and HTML5 that make a lot of this so much easier, but it wasn't impossible before. But it was impossible before the advent of what eventually became the fetch API.

Virtualization and Containers

This is a big one. With virtualization and more specifically with docker, the job of software development is so much easier. You can run anything reliably, reproducibly, without going through any rigamarole of getting access to and setting up physical servers. You can define a Dockerfile once and have a stable environment that you know will work on your own system as well as on everyone else's.

If you want to run something on your build server, you don't need to worry about going through the work of logging in and getting the dependencies set up. Or worry about updating everything the next time you need to make a change. Define it once and then it works.

Having 32 Gigabytes of memory also helps with this.

4K Monitors

Similar to the introduction of flat CRTs, 4K monitors were mind-blowing for me. Everything just looks so much better. Crisp text. Everything really feels flat in a good way.

For the last 20 years I've been anxiously awaiting full-color e-ink displays to be invented and become mainstream and practical for everyday use.

What Hasn't Changed

The same Saturn V rocket in winter of 2023. It's still in the exact same place but now indoors! I bet it is even air-conditioned in the summer.

It is notable that I haven't mentioned anything about modern programming languages or paradigms. Or anything about version control. Or even AI. I don't think that any of these things actually have had a large practical effect on the day-to-day of programming. Many trends ebb and flow.

Everything that was old is new again. For any new hyped technology, you can almost certainly find some book from the 1960s talking about it. Not much about the fundamentals has changed since then.

I'm anxiously awaiting the next big change. The big changes excite me, and it feels like we are due for one.

Leo Bayer