[signaru]

Maybe cheating a bit if we allow compilers to run on more powerful machines, different from where the program will run. It could be possible to utilize more modern or "ergonomic" programming languages or rely on convenient libraries (assuming they are also efficiently coded). Programming languages in the 80s would not be as fun as what we have today partly because they were designed for limited hardware and partly because there's not a lot of other languages to learn from yet. IDEs, tooling and libraries have also come a long way.

Knowledge access is also something that has improved significantly. Programmers back then may not have had all the information that could have improved their work.