> It was a very different world, and just being able to write in a higher-level language than assembly on a particular computer was a big deal. It was differen

> It was a very different world, and just being able to write in a higher-level language than assembly on a particular computer was a big deal. It was different then, but not by too much. Our tooling, languages, etc, has improved yes, but the underlying hardware still exists and occasionally the general solution provided by our improved tooling is sub optimal for our use case. I actually _like_ where C has wound up. I have way better static analysis tooling at my disposal than I had 15 years ago and I can use a "memory safe" language like python or OCaml and say "hey, I know better here", think carefully, and push the memory safe compiler out of my way.