Early Nintendo programmer worked without a keyboard
&gt; Sakurai, who was 20 at the time, says he simply thought this keyboard-free programming environment was &quot;the way it was done,&quot; and he coded an entire functional test product using just the trackball.<p>Maybe ten years from now, I can recount the horrid tales of writing code in notepad that didn&#x27;t even have Ctrl+S shortcut, let alone code highlighting. :) Joking aside, I revere veteran programmers who wrote without keyboards, and coded mostly in assembly but I can&#x27;t help think if it was pretty normal because that&#x27;s the way things were done at that time.<p>There is a opinion I hit on every now and then—of programming, especially web development, getting ridiculously easier compared to the past. It has, to a great extent, considering the tools and the computing power we have now, but the complexity of software is also pacing at the same speed, briskly consuming that efficiency. The real question that should be asked is: was programming in the past inordinately difficult when seen in perspective of software complexity the market demanded? Is software development easier today because the gain in programming efficiency is more than the complexity of software that needs to be made?