I've experienced some 10x jumps, mainly because I tend to wait until something comes along that's 10x before switching. Not that I'm smart, but stubborn.
- Turbo Pascal. My dad knew nothing about computers, but the Wall Street Journal ran an article about TP, and he knew I was interested in programming, so he got me a copy for my birthday. It allowed me to program almost as quickly as BASIC, but with half a chance of my programs working. (Yes, 50% chance was a 10x improvement). Not to mention, a motivation to learn more disciplined programming.
- HyperCard and then Visual Basic. I never had to learn the guts of a modern OS and its API just to write usable software.
- "Scientific" Python stack. The quality and breadth of the language, tools, and libraries is just stunning to me. I looked into Python because it was getting a lot of "buzz" when I first joined HN. Thanks, y'all.
- Arduino and the higher powered microcontrollers that it supports, for making it easy and quick to whip up applications. But even pre-Arduino, a number of 10x improvements came along for me on the hardware / electronics side, starting with microprocessor interfacing in BASIC, EEPROM based microcontrollers, decent C compilers for embedded.
- Turbo Pascal. My dad knew nothing about computers, but the Wall Street Journal ran an article about TP, and he knew I was interested in programming, so he got me a copy for my birthday. It allowed me to program almost as quickly as BASIC, but with half a chance of my programs working. (Yes, 50% chance was a 10x improvement). Not to mention, a motivation to learn more disciplined programming.
- HyperCard and then Visual Basic. I never had to learn the guts of a modern OS and its API just to write usable software.
- "Scientific" Python stack. The quality and breadth of the language, tools, and libraries is just stunning to me. I looked into Python because it was getting a lot of "buzz" when I first joined HN. Thanks, y'all.
- Arduino and the higher powered microcontrollers that it supports, for making it easy and quick to whip up applications. But even pre-Arduino, a number of 10x improvements came along for me on the hardware / electronics side, starting with microprocessor interfacing in BASIC, EEPROM based microcontrollers, decent C compilers for embedded.