Ask HN: In what ways is programming more difficult today than it was years ago?
Programming today is easier in many ways: Information is readily available for free (I recall saving up a lot of money for a kid to buy specific programming books at the book store after exhausting my library’s offerings). Compilers and tooling are free. Salaries are much higher and developers are  a respected career that isn’t just “IT”. Online programming communities are more abundant and welcoming than impenetrable IRC cliques of years past. We have a lot that makes programming today more comfortable and accessible than it was in the past.<p>However, everything feels vastly more complicated. My friends and I would put together little toy websites with PHP or Rails in a span of weeks and everyone thought they were awesome. Now I see young people spending months to get the basics up and running in their React front ends just to be able to think independently of hand-holding tutorials for the most basic operations.<p>Even business software felt simpler. The scope was smaller and you didn’t have to set up complicated cloud services architectures to accomplish everything.<p>I won’t say the old ways were <i>better</i>, because the modern tools do have their place. However, it’s easy to look back with rose-tinted glasses on the vastly simpler business requirements and lower expectations that allowed us to get away with really simple things.<p>I enjoy working with teams on complex projects using modern tools and frameworks, but I admit I do have a lot of nostalgia for the days past when a single programmer could understand and handle entire systems by themselves because the scope and requirements were just so much simpler.