Well... I have to admit that I'm not a CS'ist, and I just assumed that a lot of the progress has come from CS.
But I'm just thinking of something like the transition from BASIC to Pascal (which I experienced in 1983). There were rules of thumb that we learned in BASIC (avoid global variables and GOTO's) that were formalized in Pascal, and Pascal also let you create much more elaborate named structures, and control the scope of names more precisely.
That's just one really simplistic example, but it rather profoundly improved my programming. On the other hand, I can believe that scaling is still a struggle -- there is still a point where we run out of juice, but it's a lot further than you'd get with BASIC, or with Excel-sans-macros.
But I'm just thinking of something like the transition from BASIC to Pascal (which I experienced in 1983). There were rules of thumb that we learned in BASIC (avoid global variables and GOTO's) that were formalized in Pascal, and Pascal also let you create much more elaborate named structures, and control the scope of names more precisely.
That's just one really simplistic example, but it rather profoundly improved my programming. On the other hand, I can believe that scaling is still a struggle -- there is still a point where we run out of juice, but it's a lot further than you'd get with BASIC, or with Excel-sans-macros.