system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Computer science teachers (and still working older programmers/developers): What has changed in the last 20 years?

I cut my teeth on coding as a high schooler banging out class/HW exercises in turbo PASCAL.  After taking your typical 3 semester lower division intro CS classes in college, I never really touched any code at all unless you count some scripting-type stuff in MATLAB.  The main threads of what I remember in broad strokes from my c/c++ based programming I,II, III consisted of string operations, data structures, and object oriented principles and practices.  It's all a blur.  Everything I'd used to work on, including the IDE itself (such as they were in the pre-graphic days), fitted on a floppy.  (<1.44 MB for those not in my target audience.)  I lost a lot of sleep back in the day, but I confess I regard Borland fondly and with nostalgia.

Fast forward to today, I am completely overwhelmed by what I see.  Python seems to be the teaching language of choice for many structured courses.  not too scary.  However, the IDEs in use, such as MS Visual Studio, appear absolutely monstrous compared to text based and command line environment I used to work on.  People now talk about "code refactoring"(?) and it isn't rare for collaborative project assignments involving the use of CVS code management tools, which I was aware of as a young student but was never required to learn.  Similarly, competency with debugging tools/techniques appear to be a must.

I feel like I'm functionally starting from scratch, as the total mentality and attitude in writing code and software development has evolved beyond what I experienced as a young student.  (edit: Or maybe I just received a REALLY bad education without the real world experience to realize it.)  The rise of mobile devices appear to have made languages like Objective-C & Swift popular for aspiring developers in the Apple camp.  In that vein, I've been given lots of "advice" from those with specific goal-oriented motivations in acquiring programming skills/experience.  I don't necessarily want to help build the next release of "Call of Duty" or engage in commercial work.  I'd like to think I'm seeking to be a well-rounded generalist with a good set of core skills.  But it *would* be nice to become proficient enough with parallel programming techniques/methods to use today's modern hardware to crunch pattern matching problems.  Until I realized how rusty I'd become on the basics, I foolishly believed I could pick up OpenCL, CUDA, and OpenMPI without too much trouble.  Such as things are, I need to spend some time "learning to walk" again, so to speak.  But it sure feels like I'm an Earth-born Terran navigating an alien planet with toxic atmosphere and a different gravity, lol.  I have no idea how much effort is really involved ahead of me at the moment.  But if there is anything you can offer that can help me get a lay of the land to better get from here to there, it would be much appreciated.

**tl;dr**:  Trying to brush up after taking classes but never using programming skills since the 2000s.  Not a complete N00b, but feel like one given the changes in the last 20-ish years.  seeking advice.
gpt
We all need to learn how to “walk” again sometimes. A lot has changed since the early 2000’s, most notably, we have moved away from the need to know the inner workings of lower level programming as much as we used to. 

A lot of top level languages abstract most of that stuff away from us, unless absolutely necessary. You mentioned the use of IDE’s and how you would be more comfortable with Console or Text based editors, and you can still use them, but the advanced IDE’s come with a number of benefits (IMO) over terminal/console & text based editors. Namely the use of syntax highlighting, linting and the like. 

You’re right, programming has come a long way, and is a lot more involved or complicated than it used to be, but it’s also gotten a lot more simple in other ways. The type of programming guide that you’re looking for is like looking for a part to a broken family appliance, it’s possible to find it, but it would be much easier to throw it away and find the newest edition.