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Comment by ramijames | Hacker News Reader

I feel like BASIC on my C64 was the last time I really, intuitively understood what my computer was doing when I was programming and executing software.

There are so many layers between me and the hardware today that I feel like I float above it, and that I just have to trust it all intrinsically.

I don't, really, and it constantly gives me this feeling of almost falling.

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I can totally relate to that, and it is why I really got into WebAssembly. It is such a simple concept that you can understand it fully, easy to write by hand, create an emulator, and more. Feels like stepping back in time :-)

Well, it is amazing you can write something in a decent set of Javascript these days and have it execute mostly the same across Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, irrespective of CPU architecture.

It is, but at the same time I know that if I re-run it in two years it will suffer from bitrot and ill have to futz around with it to get to run. I hate that a lot.

Surely by "re-run" you mean "try to re-build". If you write something that runs in the browser today (and you're not doing something dumb like using experimental or otherwise non-standard APIs), chances are extremely high that it will still work in two years. The browser is one of the most consistent, interoperable, stable software platforms that the industry has managed to produce.

Yes, that's what I mean, thanks.

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