Programmers then and now

You always think you remember how to center a div until you try to do it again after a few years

Meh, those are just the programmers that are remembered.
They did lots of dumb shit too. Mario 64 was a super-innovative game at the time with its free 3D platforming. There's also tons of weird code in there, and the developers also fucked up by shipping a debug build of the game, costing a not insignificant amount of performance.
- Is that true about the debug build? I had it on the N64 way back when and don't remember it being especially laggy. OTOH I was young, and relatively shit at computer games
  
  Yup, they shipped a debug build. Here's a video that shows the build side-by-side with one that was compiled with compiler optimizations: https://youtu.be/9_gdOKSTaxM
  It was quite laggy in certain areas, particularly the submarine sank the framerate quite considerably.

Programmers of the past didn't have to work 2 jobs to be able to buy a house and live comfortably, less alone spend most of their paycheck on inflated prices for gas, food, services, etc. But hey we got AI and Amazon Prime now.
- Not to mention the sense of pioneering something. Like I imagine calculating the Moon landing is something you're happy to spend 80+ hours a week on, especially when basic needs are taken care of.
  
  Not to mention the sense of pioneering something.
  something you're happy to spend 80+ hours a week on, especially when basic needs are taken care of.
  Vs writing the same thing that already exists with a different front end, a bunch of times with different examples, because somebody who has more resources (not just more cash, but also time) decides visuals are more important than real functionality.
  Part of the reason I don't like 'coding' or developing software its because is so dreadful and feels overly stupid when an open source alternative works better than what you'd be able to make before the deadline.
  I just rather be a CTO / SysAdmin and live happier.
  
  Margaret Hamilton's first job out of undergrad was working for Lorenz. She was incredibly accomplished with several stints in top labs, by the time of Apollo. It's not like opportunities for trail blazing software fell out of the sky on shlubs who barely passed undergrad data structures and algorithms courses.

I get what this is saying but on the other hand...
Programmers now:
💪 Can spin up a minimum viable product in a day
💪 Writes web applications that handle millions or even billions of requests per second
💪 Remote code execution and memory related vulnerabilities are rarer than ever now
💪 Can send data across the world with sub 1 second latency
💪 The same PCIe interface is now 32x faster (16x PICe 1 was 8GB/s, while PCIe 6 is 256GB/s)
💪 The same wireless bands now have more throughput due to better radio protocols and signal processing
💪 Writes applications that scale across the over 100 cores of modern top of the line processors
💪 JIT and garbage collection techniques have improved to the point where they have a nearly imperceptible performance impact in the majority of use cases
💪 Most bugs are caught by static analysis and testing frameworks before release
💪 Codebases are worked on by thousands of people at the same time
💪 Functional programming, which is arguably far less bug prone, is rapidly gaining traction as a paradigm
💪 Far more emphasis on immutability to the point where many languages have it as the default
💪 Virtual machines can be seamlessly transferred from one computer to another while they're running
💪 Modern applications can be used by people anywhere in the world regardless of language, even things that were very difficult to do in the past like mirroring the entire interface to allow an application that was written for left to right languages to support right to left
💪 Accessibility features allow people who are blind, paralyzed, or have other disabilities to use computers just as well as anyone else
Just wanted to provide come counter examples because I'm not a huge fan of the "programmers are worse than they were back in the 80s" rethoric. While programmers today are more reliant on automated tools, I really disagree that programmers are less capable in general than they were in the past.
- For sure, it's a lot easier to do a lot of stuff today than before, but the way we build software has become incredibly wasteful as well. Also worth noting that some of the workflows that were available in languages like CL or Smalltalk back in the 80s are superior to what most languages offer today. It hasn't been strictly progress in every regard.
  I'd say the issue isn't that programmers are worse today, but that the trends in the industry select for things that work just well enough, and that's how we end up with stuff like Electron.
  
  Also worth noting that some of the workflows that were available in languages like CL or Smalltalk back in the 80s are superior to what most languages offer today.
  In what ways? I don't have any experience with those so I'm curious.
- 💪 Writes web applications that handle millions or even billions of requests per second
  This has nothing to do with SO or AI.

I’m still trapped in vim 25 years on.

Let’s just say hypothetically I vibe coded my vim config. Where would that put me?

In the past I'd be forever stuck without Stackoverflow to help me.
I couldn't get out of vim without a miracle.
Pointers were so confusing, I'd go without them.

- @Cysioland @yogthos
  Found it!

As a beginning programmer, this is extremely discouraging and makes me want to do something else with my time.
Instead of punching down at those who are clearly undertrained, you should elevate those around you. Being a dick about it doesn't seem like a good use of your time.
- What does this have to do with being a beginner programmer and punching down? The meme is about how we do programming in general today vs the way it was done before.
  
  The meme reads as "if you can't do these things you're dumb" the things you've typed as examples of how coding is done nowadays are similar to things that any beginner would be typing into a search engine as well.
  Your meme doesn't compare between coding practices, it compares between the results of early programmers doing the absolute most with the hardware that was purpose built for their needs to people who literally don't know how to program looking up information and progressing their knowledge.
- This looks more like a joke.
  I used to get stuck forever without Stackoverflow, avoided pointers altogether, got stuck in vim for hours figuring out how to exit the program and did not use it again for another five years.
  Assembly is painfully slow to write anything in.