A long time ago, developers wrote assembly code that ran fast and light. On good days, they had enough money in their budget to hire someone to toggle all those switches on the front of the machine to input their code. On bad days, they flipped the switches themselves. Life was simple: The software loaded data from memory, did some arithmetic, and sent it back. That was all.
Today, developers must work with teams spread across multiple continents where people speak different languages with different character sets and – this is the bad part – use different versions of the compiler. Some of the code is new, and some may be from decade-old libraries that may or may not come with source code. Building team spirit and slogging through the mess is only the beginning of what it means to be a programmer today.
Source: 21 technologies transforming software development | InfoWorld