Ask HN: In what ways is programming more difficult today than it was years ago?
I&#x27;ve been programming professionally since about 1994, using C++, Java, Scheme, Python, Go, JavaScript and friends.<p>Today, tools are incredibly better; compilers, debuggers, profilers. I&#x27;ll take something from JetBrains or Visual Studio any day over what I had available in the 1990&#x27;s. There were some gems back then, but today, tools are uniformly good.<p>What has gotten difficult is the complexity of the systems which we build. Say I&#x27;m building a simple web app in JS with a Go backend and I want users to have some kind of authentication. I have to deal with something like Oauth2, therefore CORS, and auth flows, and to iterate on it, I have some code open in Goland, some code open in VS Code and my browser, and as a third component, I have something like Auth0 or Cognito in a third window. It&#x27;s all nasty.<p>If I&#x27;m writing a desktop application, I have to deal with code signing, I can&#x27;t just give it to a friend to try. It&#x27;s doubly as annoying if it&#x27;s for a cell phone. If I need to touch 3D hardware, I now have to deal with different API&#x27;s on different platforms.<p>It&#x27;s all, tedious, and it&#x27;s an awful lot of work to get to a decent starting point. All these example apps in the wild are always missing a lot of the hard, tedious stuff.<p>Edit:<p>All that being said, today, I can spin up a scalable server in some VM&#x27;s in the cloud and have something available to users in a week. In the 1990s, if there was a server component, I&#x27;d be looking for colo facilities, installing racks, having to set up software, provision network connections, and it would take me ten times as long to the first prototype. I&#x27;d have to write more from scratch myself. Much as some things today are more tedious, on net, I&#x27;m more productive, but part of that is more than 25 years of experience.