Speaking as a former COBOL programmer who did Y2K work you really don't know that you've got it good. Some of that code was a vile mess of hacks, commented code , blocks of code that couldn't be touched on case they broke so had to be coded around. Shit code can be written without frameworks and in my experience more often is, due to the wheel being reinvented repeatedly and badly. The good old days never existed and personally I'm far happier writing C# in Visual Studio for SMEs than I ever was trying to debug some horrendous code written by a moron 30 years ago that some bank utterly depends on and which is probably still in use now 10 years after I escaped.