Comment Re:IIgs was slow? No way! (Score 2) 69
I read the article differently -- a reminiscing of what they went through as teens learning computers and of how different things are today.
I was programming in the about the same year, though I was younger. I was one of the very few kids who came into my first computer science (early 2000s) class knowing C and C++ (and Perl and Pascal) and having written actual programs in Assembly before.
Even then, the professors were saying don't worry about optimization, compilers are so good now, speeds are improving so rapidly, you have better things to focus on, etc. I actually got points marked off on a test once because I came up with (what I thought was) a nifty loop optimization for solving a problem. It was correct but marked off because of "premature optimization." (I tested it later and my answer was indeed far faster than the model answer.)
Today, almost nobody ever needs to program in asm. Today, almost everybody is programming by gluing bits of often highly optimized (but often not) libraries together. It's how even simple programs can have 50+ dependencies now. Probably for the vast majority of programmers, even those who have been programming for 20+ years, this IS a fascinating look into the past. It reminded me of some of the things friends and I did in highschool! Our highschool had a couple of games that had been developed over multiple years by successive groups of students. One group wrote the initial code, another group pulled the Doom networking code into the project, another one updated that form IPX/SPX to TCP/IP, etc. Not unique, but fun times.