Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

I feel myself descending into old-fartitude more and more with every year. My wife and I were recently involved in a car accident (no one was hurt). While I was being checked out I overheard a 20-year-old firefighter exchange Facebook information with an 18-year-old EMT. I was like, "wait a minute, you guys seem really young and you still use Facebook? I thought Facebook was for your grandparents and all the kids now use Snapchat or TikTok?"

I get that same feeling now. This kid is 20 and still using C89? Shouldn't people his age have been reared entirely in the crystal-spires-and-togas utopia of Rust, with raw pointers and buffer overruns being mere legends of their people's benighted past told to them by their elders?

It's kind of comforting to see young programmers embracing the old ways, even if it's for hack value only.

Admittedly, C89 has very little utility, especially among people my age. For example, my university progresses from Racket to Java to C++, and has a systems course that partially teaches C11. Although good for teaching, I don't think those languages artificially constrained me in the ways that C89 does. I felt that my programming skills improved the most when I forced myself to work in such an under-powered language.

I also like the idea of being able to run my code anywhere, kind of like Doom.

I think kids or at least there’s the risk of kids seeing old people romantically reenacting their eight bit micro days and think that it’s some thing besides nostalgia.

I was kind of the opposite as a kid, if it wasn’t crazy futuristic I didn’t want it. So even in the 80s I wanted an FPGA accelerators in every machine.

It's not just nostalgia. Those old computers really are fun to operate -- like an MGB is fun to drive -- in ways modern systems aren't, even if they are far less useful than a modern system. In fact it's now possible to take advantage of modern software tools on modern systems and push those old beasts to new heights they couldn't have possibly reached during their heyday.

> even in the 80s I wanted an FPGA accelerators in every machine

Mostly unrelated, but I recently discovered that you can buy TPUs, right now, as a consumer product, from https://coral.ai.

The stock firmware already allows you to run these things so hard they overheat, which is amazing.

But yes, I also want FPGA accelerators.

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