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John L. Miller
My answer is a qualified "yes, coding is easier today." In fact, it's so much easier to attain a given (relatively complex) result that it's not even worth comparing the two.
In 1985 the 6 mhz IBM Personal Computer/AT was state of the art for microcomputers, as was the Apple IIe and the first incredible version of the Apple Macintosh. Most programs rendered text or simple ASCII-art style graphics. Most games were incredibly simple (think centipede, or adventure games with a picture and four choices at each step of play). It took an insane amount of work to get these results, dealing with a processor that was perhaps as slow as 1 mhz, 64 kb of RAM, an 80 column screen if you were lucky, and amazing 640 x 480 graphics.
64 kb of RAM, and for almost everyone, floppy drives at best. For significant programs, every byte had to be accounted for and carefully structured to fit the pieces you needed into the tiny RAM. When I started working on my first game - NinjaQuest (never released), I had to write my own sprite editor in assembler, and hand-animate the characters. side-scrolling had to be done very carefully to change a minimum of information on the screen. And don't even get me started on sound... All in 6502 assembler which I affectionately refer to as write-only code. BTW, the computers were around $2,000 in 1985 dollars.
(assembly code from Gamasutra: David H. Schroeder's Blog )
Today if I want to write a program, I boot up a $500 machine with a $350 4k UHD monitor. I run either Visual Studio or IntelliJ Idea, and have more than a terabyte of disk space to store the programs I write. If I want to animate things or have 3D characters, and if I'm not planning to sell the program, I can browse the internet and find some pretty decent sprites, art, pictures, and 3D models for the taking. With a couple hundred hours of effort I could put together a game with 3D characters moving around, perfect 3D sound, and have it be reasonably bug free. Thank you DirectX and OpenGL!
Suppose I wanted to build a sidescroller like NinjaQuest that I worked on for several hundred hours before I gave up. Between the tools available today and the incredible resources, I could build a better experience that looked and sounded better than I could ever have hoped in perhaps 100-200 hours. Then I could share it with the entire world over the internet.
Is coding easier today? For the things we can meaningfully compare, ABSOLUTELY. The barrier to entry is lower, the sources of information are higher quality, and there are tens of thousands of people out there who will answer your questions for fun. Your biggest problem today is, quite simply choice. So many choices of language, of environment, of platform.
Choice is, of course, a good thing. As are computers.
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My answer is a qualified "yes, coding is easier today." In fact, it's so much easier to attain a given (relatively complex) result that it's not even worth comparing the two.
In 1985 the 6 mhz IBM Personal Computer/AT was state of the art for microcomputers, as was the Apple IIe and the first incredible version of the Apple Macintosh. Most programs rendered text or simple ASCII-art style graphics. Most games were incredibly simple (think centipede, or adventure games with a picture and four choices at each step of play). It took an insane amount of work to get these results, dealing with a processor that was perhaps as slow as 1 mhz, 64 kb of RAM, an 80 column screen if you were lucky, and amazing 640 x 480 graphics.
64 kb of RAM, and for almost everyone, floppy drives at best. For significant programs, every byte had to be accounted for and carefully structured to fit the pieces you needed into the tiny RAM. When I started working on my first game - NinjaQuest (never released), I had to write my own sprite editor in assembler, and hand-animate the characters. side-scrolling had to be done very carefully to change a minimum of information on the screen. And don't even get me started on sound... All in 6502 assembler which I affectionately refer to as write-only code. BTW, the computers were around $2,000 in 1985 dollars.
(assembly code from Gamasutra: David H. Schroeder's Blog )
Today if I want to write a program, I boot up a $500 machine with a $350 4k UHD monitor. I run either Visual Studio or IntelliJ Idea, and have more than a terabyte of disk space to store the programs I write. If I want to animate things or have 3D characters, and if I'm not planning to sell the program, I can browse the internet and find some pretty decent sprites, art, pictures, and 3D models for the taking. With a couple hundred hours of effort I could put together a game with 3D characters moving around, perfect 3D sound, and have it be reasonably bug free. Thank you DirectX and OpenGL!
Suppose I wanted to build a sidescroller like NinjaQuest that I worked on for several hundred hours before I gave up. Between the tools available today and the incredible resources, I could build a better experience that looked and sounded better than I could ever have hoped in perhaps 100-200 hours. Then I could share it with the entire world over the internet.
Is coding easier today? For the things we can meaningfully compare, ABSOLUTELY. The barrier to entry is lower, the sources of information are higher quality, and there are tens of thousands of people out there who will answer your questions for fun. Your biggest problem today is, quite simply choice. So many choices of language, of environment, of platform.
Choice is, of course, a good thing. As are computers.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
