Programming Concepts That Were "Automated" By Modern Languages [closed]

Question

Optimizations.

For the longest time, it was necessary to do this by hand. Now most compilers can do it infinitely better than any human ever could.

Note: This is not to say that hand-optimizations aren't still done, as pointed out in the comments. I'm merely saying that a number of optimizations that used to be done by hand are automatic now.

I think writing machine code deserves a mention.

Data collections

Hash tables, linked lists, resizable arrays, etc

All these had to be done by hand before.

Iteration over a collection:

foreach (string item in items)
{
    // Do item
}

Database access, look at the ActiveRecord pattern in Ruby.

The evil goto.

Memory management, anybody? I know it's more efficient to allocate and deallocate your own memory explicitly, but it also leads to Buffer Overruns when it's not done correctly, and it's so time consuming - a number of modern languages will allocate and garbage collect automatically.

Event System

Before you had to implement the Observer Pattern all by yourself. Today ( at least in .NET ) you can simply use "delegates" and "events"