This kind of comment frustrates me. Not the original DHH comment, but the above one. So because DHH didn't like it, we're also obligated to? God forbid people e

This kind of comment frustrates me. Not the original DHH comment, but the above one. So because DHH didn't like it, we're also obligated to? God forbid people enjoy things! It's a sad cultural meme to go to any post and see the top comment be something that tears down the content. Putting that aside, I think the DHH comment isn't the full story on demoscene. Demoscene people were interested in those languages because that's where you perhaps could do the most interesting things at the time. Some people still cling to that, and some don't. For example Farbrausch, one of the most famous demo teams, released the tool they were using themselves, called werkkzeug, which was basically a GUI way to generate cool demos that still were tiny and had procedurally generated textures and effects etc etc. Similarly, I've seen a neat demos that use modern tools, a lot use GPUs and shaders these days, but it depends what they're trying to do. Sometimes they want to squeeze all that into a tiny binary - can we have a fully running game engine in smaller size than a jpeg of my face? But a lot of times size isn't a consideration, and it's about how cool of a thing can you do! One example that comes to mind is Agenda Circling Forth. I think it's very beautiful. I wouldn't hesitate to call it art at this point. Here is a video of it running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5w7Gh7WBjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5w7Gh7WBjw Some articles with more technical details: https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/agenda-circling-forth/ https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/agenda-circli... https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-modern-particle-system/ https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-... Tens of millions of particles, and in 2010! Very impressive, and you'll notice that almost none of the discussion is about assembly and compilers and bit twiddling. So what did all this effort accomplish? First of all, fun! I don't think anyone worried about any of this if they didn't think it was enjoyable. Second, a lot of interesting ideas were created and popularized that made their way into the roots of the computer graphics and video game industries of today. And a lot of the people came from there too. A lot of these people work at Unreal, CryTek, etc where they build the engines that power games we play today. Unfortunately I think it's hard for a small demo team today to "beat" the output of years of concerted effort and millions of research and man hours that goes into something like the Unreal Engine. So fun matters more. I guess there's also an interest in those things because of a "back to the basics" feel. If you want to do any computer graphics today you need tools upon tools upon tools upon languages and it's all a bit too much. Some folks yearn for the days where they can write some code that looks like "top left pixel is green". A bit similar to why people had so much fun with neocities recently. Anyway, these are my two cents on why people enjoy this. Raining on people's parade is not a nice thing and I keep seeing it happen here.