With the many examples I see of very skilled programmers using retro tools for their personal projects, I wonder if it goes the other way too -- are there examples of highly capable programmers choosing bleeding-edge tools for personal projects? What does that look like?
> I see of very skilled programmers using retro tools for their personal projects
Interesting observation, and something I hadn't really though about. For my own stuff I increasingly pick older technologies, not really retro, like jcs does here. Personally I think I've just grown tired of the modern "stuff", it's way to complex for me to find it relaxing to write a few lines of code for the fun of it. I wonder if that's true in a boarder sense for others working in IT.
I've watched a few of these videos, where jcs just hacks away on his old Mac and I'm extremely impressed with what's actually possible on these old machine. I do think the compile times would drive me insane, but others might see it as a nice little break.
My coworkers think I'm insane, but I do my side projects in C because I find it so much more relaxing and satisfying than what I do at work (Angular and C#). They can't understand why I find C relaxing because they find it terrifying. I just find it so much simpler to work with functions, structs and pointers rather than abstraction chains ten layers deep.
Granted, I'm using it on homemade game engines, which are very amenable to the simple type of code C allows you to write. I wouldn't want to write an HTTP server in it. But for what I build, I find using C to be the equivalent of woodworking, compared to the Ikea furniture I put together at work.
The PC of that era was such an unpredictable mess of components, you couldn't even assume a specific sound card was present. VGA 256-color modes didn't even have square pixels unless you went Mode-X which was rather annoying to program for.
I think there are far better retro hardware choices to relive writing native programs for. Stuff you'll actually be able to ensure will run successfully with full graphics and sound capabilities on every instance of the thing. C64, Amiga, etc. There's a reason the x86 PC severely lagged behind in the demoscene for ages, it was just miserable hardware to support.
I recently became involved in the P2 community, the new propeller microcontroller from parallax (which just hit rev C). There's some very talented people there doing interesting things with it.
Some of them have been programming it before it was even proper silicon, when it was being developed via FPGA. Lots of really in-the-weeds discussions on machine code and cycle timings and such. Worth diving in if you like seeing "how the sausage is made."
Offers will vary, but, if impromptu answers carry any weight, then off the top of my Sunday afternoon head, this is the first reference that percolates to the surface.
