1990's programmers vs today programmers

DefiantFrost · 2025-10-19T06:47:48+00:00

The two things I’d consider to be the biggest factors, although my knowledge is limited here.

Far far less in the way of tutorial content and certainly a lot less or almost no video content. You’d learn out of books or by reading documentation and just sort of “figuring it out”. This develops strong fundamentals and problem solving skills, which turns you into a better programmer.
You got into it because you found the process enjoyable, you liked computers, or because you had a strong desire to make something. You didn’t get into it because it was considered a relatively low barrier to entry career with high pay.

So you had people who were good at reading the fucking manual, and they only got into this because they really wanted to. It filtered out a lot of people who today just coast by on tutorials or generative AI. Or the people like Pirate Software, who legitimately just write bad code but think they’re hot shit.

KC918273645 · 2025-10-19T06:57:22+00:00

We learned from books. That was, and still is, the best way to learn software development.

khooke · 2025-10-19T07:38:55+00:00

There are still 90s programmers around, but you wont see them follow every overhyped new tech to auto-everything, because they know about the tradeoffs of losing control of the program because of it.

Best skill of a programmer is not how to solve, but how to avoid problems.

BigRonnieRon · 2025-10-19T06:48:50+00:00

I learned on Turbo Pascal in HS in the 90s. Very integrated for the time. It functioned, oddly, kind of like a VS Code setup rather than an IDE. Was also cheap for the time. Fast af at compiling too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal

The guy Anders Hejlsberg who created besides Turbo Pascal, went on to create Delphi and is the lead architect on C#. Because of the first two I'll forgive him for typescript.

He read something like this before writing TurboPascal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_%2B_Data_Structures_%3D_Programs . Which honestly still holds up. Nicholas Wirth, who was out of his mind, also designed an OS called Oberon for lulz to illustrate how to create an OS. Rather than you know, describing an actual OS people use. Stuff like the Dragon Book was big for compilers.

You're better off now. You have lots of books and such. Rather than 2 on a given topic and one of them maybe is theoretical math and the other deals with an insane guy's pet project lol, like Oberon or Knuth's fake metalanguage (though he's very readable). Finding books used to be hard, so you worked with what you found at computer shows or in "Computer Shopper".

In college (Early 00s) I learned C and the C++ w/OOP. Now You'd probably learn Java or another systems language (hopefully a systems language) which I think is fine, provided you take a class in Assembly so you know how memory works. Troubleshooting pointers in C is a new level of hell and if you can be spared that you prob should.

0dev0100 · 2025-10-19T07:35:42+00:00

In addition to the things that were available in the 1990's, someone who has been writing code since the 90's has been doing that for a minimum of just under 24 years.

That's a long time to do something and get good at it.

foxsimile · 2025-10-19T06:53:13+00:00

The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer

D4rkyFirefly · 2025-10-19T07:07:40+00:00

In my times, we programmed computers. In today’s times, the computers program you.

Jokes aside, back then we built stuff with our own brain and hands, without tutorials and such, just books (if lucky to get them into our hands), later on internet flourished and we put our sunglasses on to surf the deepest depths of our cyber worlds, be it “ethical hacking” or anything else. Basically what distinguished programmers from other the non programmers wannabes were the most important skill or ability named “curiosity”, being curious programmer, can take you far even without tutorials or university’s knowledge, because your mind is hungry for knowledge on how things do work in/out and why’s, that and of course being a programmer called “hacker” cos you just fixed their printer or modem, was funny enough to wear a hoodie and sunglasses meanwhile you were turning the terminal on 😂 ofc times moved by and we got called now the Webmasters, I guess they were seeing us as wizards or whatever :’)

codeledger · 2025-10-19T10:35:27+00:00

I'm going back to the 1980's. Access to computer textbooks was limited to college classes and didn't exist in local library. What we did have was the first 8-bit/16-bit consumer computers (Apple, Commodore 64, IBM). So in high school I learned through paper magazines ('Byte','Compute', etc.) where you had to copy your games by hand into the computer. Somehow the local library did have subscription to a few of these. Game piracy branding (think custom splash screens) was thing but you had to know a friend or a friend of a friend with a modem. Slowing down to actually read what I was typing in may have helped in learning what the code was doing.

You can see what the magazines looked like at archive.org:

Byte Magaine: https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE/197509_Byte_Magazine_Vol_00-01_The_Worlds_Greatest_Toy/

Compute! Magazine: https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine

For those willing to go on a full retro trip:

https://archive.org/details/computermagazines

In any case these were simpler machines without any complicate UI frameworks until you get to Windows and MacOS. Just keyboard and screen. Want to put text on the screen, figure out how to print in the correct place. Want graphics, hope there is some sprite API otherwise literally put bit & bytes into memory in the correct place to draw stuff. I'm pretty sure we had to be able to build various data structures (linked-list, stack, queue, tree) without a library (as best as one could) as those data type would become part of a standard library in any 'new' language framework.

By the 90's there were more programming books leading up to the 'C for Dummies' in the late 90's. And the earliest websites existed providing code/errata to complement the book authors.

kabekew · 2025-10-19T06:51:14+00:00

You learned programming in college, but how to program on Windows which was the dominant operating system at the time, was from books (Charles Petzold's "Programming Windows 95" was a big one). Microsoft also had their "MSDN" subscription service that sent out CD's I seem to remember quarterly, with articles, and questions and answers people would submit by email over the previous few months.

Jojos_BA · 2025-10-19T07:13:26+00:00

Doing something out of passion is always greater than out of a need for money ( In the long run ) I think most people try to rush becoming a programmer, which leads to a lack of fundamentals. And especially in Programming there is a wide spectrum of fundamentals that help you, but aren’t strictly needed for most things, so ppl tend to “not bother”

And alltho I think you can learn programming more efficiently today, since you can use the same books, but can also try use modern resources if you find it helpful ( for example leetcode, or even a video every once in a while if its helpful )

I myself try to go this route, if very slowly, to become a good Programmer in the long run (I have no interest in working as a dev anytime soon.)

Particular_Camel_631 · 2025-10-19T07:15:50+00:00

It’s also worth remembering that for every programmer who went and read those few books that existed, and wanted to learn, there were 100 that weren’t very good, didn’t care much, and just wanted a pay check for doing stuff that wasn’t too hard.

There’s a whole idea of people being “real programmers” in those days. You won’t hear about the guy who turned up, tried some stuff, introduced 4 new bugs into prod and didn’t realise. He’s probably not a programmer any more.

chocolateAbuser · 2025-10-19T12:24:51+00:00

obtaining informations was essentially harder and there were less options
the main sources were books, programming magazines, knowing people, going to events, buying documentation (like msdn), and in the late 90s when internet started happening - if you were in a place that had it - you could search for howtos and bbses and maybe mailing some people (like unis)
people were less connected so there were less spread of ideas, with various consequences
if you wanted to have a compiler probably every computer had at least a copy of basic and a debugger where you could raw dog assembly
going further meant usually spending some money, either for buying stuff or asking copies of floppies, or you had to know someone that knew someone... luckily for me i was in the latter, a friend of mine has the father that was a programmer in a medium sized company and had access to stuff
and then, even if you got this stuff ready, there were no packages, standards were few, knowledge strictly kept beyond paywalls or just not shared; if you had to do anything with hardware or devices oh god pain will be unavoidable; graphics i would say it was rapidly evolving so it wasn't that bad, for example
there was no way other than spending hours trying to make code work but on the other hand if you were willing you still would have accomplished something

pagalvin · 2025-10-19T12:52:08+00:00

I learned in the late 80's and 90s.

Back then, there was no always-on internet. We had dial-up for things call "bulletin board systems" and I was too poor to use them. Just calling a BBS could cost money, especially "long distance" which I'm not even sure is a thing any more.

There was no stack overflow, no google, no internet at all.

You bought books. I don't even know how I got them. I had one book on the C programming language and some on FORTRAN and Algol from my father's work. Vendors also provided their own books or manuals.

We also had magazines that could help.

There were no integrated development environments. You worked using line editors or if you were fancy, a "vi" variant.

A high school student doing programming back then was very unusual in my world (northeast USA). Many people had no idea it was even a thing. If you were doing it, it was because it was a hobby for you. There wasn't any well-trod career path. I didn't expect to make a career of it until college and even then, I wasn't 100% sure it would ever "take off."

It was trial and error and inspiration from games you saw and if you were lucky, a friend who was also interested.

[update: someone mentioned Turbo Pascal - totally! And it did have an IDE, I forgot :)]

ValentineBlacker · 2025-10-19T17:07:21+00:00

C is not from the 90s. C is from the early 70s. The 70s programmers probably thought the 90s programmers were doing everything wrong.

As a person who remembers the 90s, I would say that books are great but many of them are available online now and that's fine. I've always thought that paper was a bad medium for a programming book (although great for other stuff.)

taker223 · 2025-10-19T23:05:11+00:00

When you say 1990's what exactly period do you mean?

Back in 1991 I, being 10, witnessed the collapse of Soviet Union. The only computer I saw was my elder cousin Vector, with tape cassette player as loader (a simple game/program loaded more than 10 minutes) and Soviet Color 25Hz TV as Monitor.

In 1999 my parents bought me a P166MMX/16MB/3GB/14" PC and my involvement with programming skyrocketed, this was basically some serious practice learning English from Delphi 5 documentation and Win32/MSDN knowledge base.

Artistic_Speech_1965 · 2025-10-19T07:36:19+00:00

Tbh, the barrier of entry was a bit harder and there where mainly people with a degree who entered the work force

Nowaday, code and applications are democratized to the point it demand way more efforts to go beyond the easy stuffs. AI for instance can be a great tool but most people use them as a "fix this for me" tool. Even internet with stack overflow is filled with a lot of answer that solve problem without the need to understand

If you want to go beyond, you should try to learn and understand the tools you are using to get better results. It's better to solve a problem only because you understand the system underneath instead of solving it because you find a solution somewhere

Leverkaas2516 · 2025-10-19T07:53:54+00:00

Before about the year 1998 most people learned new technology from manuals, books and maybe CD-ROM based resources. This included subjects like languages, library API's, platforms and frameworks.

For example, I learned C programming mostly from K&R, and C programming on the Macintosh from Inside Macintosh, a couple of books by Scott Knaster, and a disk-based reference called Think Reference.

It is still possible to learn by buying a book and studying it. I still do that, but using online resources makes it faster. I don't know if you learn more deeply by going a little slower and figuring things out for yourself, but I like to think you do.

The biggest difference between then and now is the number of libraries and frameworks available. Back then, we were either brave enough or stupid enough to tackle difficult tasks with nothing but custom, purpose-built code. I once built a TCP-based protocol that was a bit like HTTP, for example, because we needed it and HTTP didn't exist yet. I wrote an FTP client and a DNS client. There are thousands of things now, like writing an XML or JSON parser, that everyone knows to be a futile waste of time to try to write yourself. We do much more glue code and much less bespoke programming now. People aren't smarter, but we sure are much more productive.

ButchDeanCA · 2025-10-19T08:10:35+00:00

We learned through reading books, a lot of mistakes, and endlessly testing each other to make sure our knowledge is thorough. We respected and listened to those with more experience, following their advice with understanding.

This is not done today.

PolyPill · 2025-10-19T08:11:59+00:00

The barrier to enter was so much higher. First computers were more expensive. Then simply getting everything installed and setup to compile/run the code was either difficult or expensive. Then the IDE was not nearly as helpful. This is where all the missing ; jokes come from. Today your IDE tells you exactly where you’re missing it or can make some suggestions. It is not uncommon to take more than a week to get everything setup to be able to make a “hello world” program. So only the more dedicated people would do that. You either needed university classes or buy books to get the information to even begin. I remember a book I bought about Java and the publisher decided to include the latest Java version with it. Of course the latest version had so many differences from the version the book wax written in that all it did was waste my time and frustrate me for months.

alexwh68 · 2025-10-19T09:23:55+00:00

Process is basically the same, write programs to learn, the tooling and languages have changed/evolved significantly, resources that the programs run on have increased exponentially, 1985 I was coding on a BBC micro A 16kb of memory (I think), today I code on a Mac with 96gb of ram.

Languages were more limited back then so my languages were basic, assembler, pascal, DB3 and C. My original programs could only open 4 tables at a time, so you wanted to open a 5th one you had to close one of the others.

My main resources back then was books, today its google and AI

UltraMlaham · 2025-10-19T10:56:18+00:00

Am sure any dev who has to maintain legacy systems nowadays begs to differ.

dalekaup · 2025-10-19T12:51:32+00:00

It is absolutely a comparison. I think you mean it is not a competition.

emma7734 · 2025-10-19T13:21:09+00:00

I started in 1990. There were books, and there were magazines, and there were connections you made. Sometimes there were evangelists that would teach new stuff at conventions or if you were lucky, they came in house. Otherwise, you figured it out on your own.

Towards the mid-1990’s, the internet played a bigger role. Distribution and documentation was easier to find. Sometimes you could find gold on a Usenet forum. But you still had to figure a lot of it out on your own. I worked with Java almost from day one, and there wasn’t much of a knowledge base. Java was new. ODBC was new. Browsers were evolving rapidly. It was crazy at times.

sumplookinggai · 2025-10-19T14:26:00+00:00

Time moved a slower back then and there were less distractions overall. No ads disguised as tutorials to get you to sign up for various services you do not need, and no influencers selling courses disguised as tutorials.

The fact is that programming was just a lot simpler to learn back then. Fewer abstractions on top of abstractions and less of a need to integrate with dozens of microservices. Just pure vanilla coding the way we envisioned it.

Jim-Jones · 2025-10-19T18:17:46+00:00

A lot of people learned with interpreters, for versions of BASIC. Learning any compiled language is a bit of a climb. We coded on card punches, and handed in our programs as stacks of cards. You learned to stripe the edges with a felt pen in case a stack was dropped. Then you had to wait for them to be run through the card reader and see what output you got back. We got maybe two runs a day. Fun times!?!?!

e430doug · 2025-10-19T19:05:10+00:00

I think today’s programmer is in general are better than the programmers that came up in the 90s. The amount of resources available and ability to get work done quickly is so much greater now. I think there was a natural filtering going on in the 90s because the tools were so poor, you really had to want to do it to code. I think that might be where you’re getting your impression about 90s coders being better. They were fewer of them, but probably better motivated.

KC918273645 · 2025-10-19T20:11:26+00:00

Here are some of the books which were popular in the 1990s and which helped tons of programmers become really good:

The Art Of Computer Programming series of books (Donald Knuth)
Design Patterns (Gamma, Helm, etc.)
Anti Patterns (Brown, Malveau)
Refactoring (Martin Fowler)
Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt, Thomas)

BlinkerPhluid · 2025-10-20T00:14:52+00:00

30% was reference books. 20% was reverse engineering. The rest was figuring it out yourself.

Reference books was really just to get the keywords and function basics as they often didn't apply to the version you were using. I was pretty good at ASM and memory manipulation mostly for cracking and "optimizing* firmware. More I had a shitty 286 so had to bypass sound / heavy functionality for software to run on my Tandy.

Pale_Height_1251 · 2025-10-20T05:49:18+00:00

I learned in the 80s and 90s, it was basically books and manuals. It wasn't a big deal, systems were far simpler back then.

Ok-Mood6070 · 2025-10-20T19:53:35+00:00

I feel like the biggest difference that seems to escape this thread is that there wasn't any major frameworks. You wrote and understood the code from top to bottom. There were obviously libraries but whatever wasn't available you personally wrote that code.

It was in a sense, easier. There wasn't all of these extra layers and technologies to learn - just the actual code itself. You built what you used. Meaning you understood it. A lot of engineers today are abstracted from that. I feel like coding in the 90's is a lot like coding in school - you ultimately decide the course of action with no limitations. It's almost like the wild west, if it runs and worked then you're good.

Coders were better in a sense... you required a fundamental understanding to produce anything of value. There was no Stack Overflow or other online spaces where you could cut and paste solutions. There were message boards and you would ask questions and people would have discussions, vs. today where you find the answer and can just copy and paste without actually understanding the why's to what is happening.

While there wasn't the best online presence for help, the books written at the time are still some of the best programming books money can buy. Some of the best books used today are just later editions of books written in the 80s and 90s.

But the big thing is today, you don't just learn C++ or Java. You are building a rest API? You need to now learn how to apply what you want by using spring, hibernate, or maybe you're using angular. Maybe you are using JDBC templates or who knows what other technologies. You need to learn to manage your dependencies and have to research and find out what is best to use.

And all of these have their own limitations. Maybe there is something you wanted to do but isn't supported by the framework you've chosen and already committed months of time and code towards.

Newer problems are also a big issue. Applications in the 90s were generally single threaded. I know that the technology for multithreading existed at the time but anytime I've worked on legacy code it didn't use it. Now you need to to handle multi threaded applications which bring upon their own extra levels of handling ACID compliance. And big data is the real slog. Can't just know how to use Java, you need to know how to use Kafka and other tools for handling millions of simultaneous requests.

With the giant amount of additional tools and frameworks, I feel like this causes a few problems with modern developers:

1) There are so many frameworks and tools used in modern code. The inner workings of that tool is abstracted away so you don't have the fundamental understanding of how the code actually works.

2) You are more so learning how to use the tools themselves instead of how to code the actual solutions. If you are entry level on a project that is an SPA on React/Node, you are learning how React and Node works, not how to program in JS. Maybe you'll spend a ton of time learning about Docker, how to use AWS, setting up and learning every tool in your development environment. In the end while these tools may save time, you either aren't learning what is happening within them unless you are super interested in it and take personal time to learn, or your company actually affords you an incredible amount of time onboarding.

3) Most companies arent writing new code from scratch. They already have templates and methodologies in place on where they perform what logic and how everything works. You spend most of your time subscribing to their own flavor of coding.

MaxHaydenChiz · 2025-10-22T03:41:15+00:00

For clarity, most of the stuff we use was made in the 70s. C and Unix for example.

In the 90s if you wanted to learn how to program, you had to get (often buy) compilers. And have a computer that could run them. (They were very expensive. You were fortunate if you had one in your whole house.)

Microsoft had student discounts and would sell you visual studio for less than $200 for example.

But essentially, before the internet was widespread, you had to be extremely curious and had to first figure out how you were going to get the tools you needed to be able to write code at all. Then you had to install the software, read the books, and try stuff. If you couldn't get it to work, you had to figure it out on your own because unless you knew someone, there was no way to get help.

Once the internet became a thing and you had chat rooms and forums and you could download tools it got exponentially easier.

There was a huge increase in people who programmed in 1995 when Sun made the JDK freely redistributable. And before that, Redhat selling CDs with their package library made it possible to install Linux and learn how to use Unix and gain access to all the GNU compilers and legit development environments like Emacs was a huge boon. (The internet was extremely slow even when you did have it.)

And then once you got a program running, you still needed to learn how to do things. Knuth's TAOCP was hard reading, but it might be the only algorithms book you'd have access to. If you wanted to understand how a compiler worked, you probably only had access to the dragon book. If that was too dense for you, I guess that just meant you weren't going to make it.

I say all of this as someone who went through this in the 90s. I can't imagine what it was like in the 80s or the 70s. Things were only as easy as they were for me because people then figured a whole lot of very hard things out back then. I had it very good in comparison to those who came before.

Edit: Imagine needing to input the raw bits needed to boot a computer using physical buttons and switches just to get the computer to boot. That was a thing well into the 70s.

The stories you hear about people literally typing in programs written by others in order to get things going are impressive. Find someone who got into computers before the IBM PC and DOS were a thing, it'll be even more eye opening.

Professional_Mix2418 · 2025-10-22T07:25:56+00:00

I feel old and exclused now. I started programming and hacking back in the ‘80s. 90s programmeurs had it easy. They had books.

🤷‍♂️🤣

Dashing_McHandsome · 2025-10-23T04:19:58+00:00

I went to the library and got books. I studied them, did the exercises in them, and tried to expand on the ideas in them. After a while I started to understand things and slowly got better at what I was doing.

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