Math today does a lot of things you couldn't do with math back then. It isn't just syntactic sugar, there were simply lots of problems they didn't know how to solve since the math they had wasn't powerful enough to solve it. Calculus for example solved a lot of problems they have, and calculus isn't syntactic sugar for anything, it is a new instruction set.

However the code abstractions people used 50 years ago could still implement all programs we have today. We added a lot of sugar on top, but the core of coding remained the same. For example, you could implement Map, Reduce etc in C, they are just functions and not novel features of programming.