There's too much information today. Makes it difficult to focus. We have social media, email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Hackernews, Reddit, etc. We say that our brains are too distracted. In fact, that all is over-stimulation of neurons.

In the past, when we had no Internet, or when the resources for studying were scarce, we would intently stare at the screen, trying to understand what the program does. You'd have to disassemble and debug the program and even try to explain it to your cat, dog or a rubber duck. These days programmers are often not even familiar with the term "rubber duck debugging". We would study and read actual RFCs; programming wasn't "fish for that stuff on Stackoverflow or Google" kind of thing.

We used to let our brains wonder. Thinking about past and present. That allowed us to generate awesome, great ideas.

Today we have tons of tools and techniques that seem to be vastly better than the tools we had in the sixties, eighties, and nineties. But if you compare that with how much computational power, memory and storage capacity have expanded since then, and compare with how we utilize that power, somehow it feels like our applications are getting worse, not better.

It's nearly impossible today to perform any programming without the Internet. And that's why programming today is much more difficult than in the past. There's too much information. Too many ways to succeed, and even more to fail.