Microcontrollers! (and industrial machines in general). No, they're nothing like TIS - and you tend to write in C or similar with a good dash of bit-banging of

Microcontrollers! (and industrial machines in general). No, they're nothing like TIS - and you tend to write in C or similar with a good dash of bit-banging of assembly - but they're close enough that you feel like you're getting the gist. At least you know with TIS (and other Zachtronics games, like Shenzen IO) if you have a timing bug. In the real world timing bugs -- with industrial control equipment -- are some of the absolute worst to debug and often involved putting an expensive scope on the output to debug. Multiple chips in parallel often involves a lot of i2c and reading datasheets -- very, very similar. The modern web feels totally alien to me. I'm much more comfortable using vim and writing html by hand (with a predictably horrible look) or Perl / PHP than "modern" JS frameworks. Typescript, JS and React are the stuff of my nightmares. I'm sure that there are developers who feel similar about bitmasks and pointer arithmetic in C.