No, the author didn't miss out by not having been born in the late 70s or 80s and not experiencing this form of development.
8-bit micro BASIC development was based on the idea that it's the programmer's job to produce a complete program, and to understand all that it does from the time you type RUN until the program ends or is interrupted (by pressing Ctrl-C or RUN STOP, resetting the computer, etc.).
Today, most software developers develop program fragments that are plugged into a framework. The framework takes care of most of the details and only calls into your code for specialized logic. If you grew up programming BASIC (or Forth or Logo or Turbo Pascal), it can be confusing and frustrating to work this way because your intuitive sense of the program flow is completely disrupted.[0] I've found that younger programmers have fewer issues writing framework code. When their brains were still pliable, they learned that this is what programming is, so they adjusted to it. Even game programming, long the purview of hardcore bit diddlers, is high-level and framework-oriented thanks to engines like Unreal and Unity. Older programmers like me, sometimes their instincts and intuitions got in the way. The ones who thrived are the ones who adapted, who stopped worrying and learned to love the framework.
The entire discipline of programming is going to be disrupted again -- by AI. So today's programmers are going to be confused and frustrated when their jobs switch from writing code to prompt-engineering a model into writing code. But Gen Z will be right at home with it.
[0] I've found that working in Spring is for me an aggravating process because it involves guessing how to make ill-specified framework magic do what I want instead of, you know, writing a program that does what I want.
8-bit micro BASIC development was based on the idea that it's the programmer's job to produce a complete program, and to understand all that it does from the time you type RUN until the program ends or is interrupted (by pressing Ctrl-C or RUN STOP, resetting the computer, etc.).
Today, most software developers develop program fragments that are plugged into a framework. The framework takes care of most of the details and only calls into your code for specialized logic. If you grew up programming BASIC (or Forth or Logo or Turbo Pascal), it can be confusing and frustrating to work this way because your intuitive sense of the program flow is completely disrupted.[0] I've found that younger programmers have fewer issues writing framework code. When their brains were still pliable, they learned that this is what programming is, so they adjusted to it. Even game programming, long the purview of hardcore bit diddlers, is high-level and framework-oriented thanks to engines like Unreal and Unity. Older programmers like me, sometimes their instincts and intuitions got in the way. The ones who thrived are the ones who adapted, who stopped worrying and learned to love the framework.
The entire discipline of programming is going to be disrupted again -- by AI. So today's programmers are going to be confused and frustrated when their jobs switch from writing code to prompt-engineering a model into writing code. But Gen Z will be right at home with it.
[0] I've found that working in Spring is for me an aggravating process because it involves guessing how to make ill-specified framework magic do what I want instead of, you know, writing a program that does what I want.