Prior to the popularity of the personal computer and subsequently Internet in the 90's the software development world was primarily focused on industrial systems involving mainly low level development in assembler down to hardware level requiring intimate knowledge of the target hardware itself, predominantly designed to suit specific tasks.

Arrival of the personal computer signified the arrival of higher level languages and operating systems from CPM and MSDOS to the current Windows 7 which created a new breed of programmer in 4GL languages. Since then the variations of languages has exploded resulting in areas of specialization from scripting to interpreted or compiled systems including JIT with the .net platform. One thing remains common to all of the new developments in software, the knowledge of the fundamental concepts of programming. Once this basic skillset is mastered the language only requires a semantic change, at the root all languages are the same.