I consider myself the latter who just hasn’t had the time to look into Rust or Zig extensively. But also, I work in safety critical application and it would be hard to shift the organization over to Rust for a lot of reasons, both technological and political.
I was in high school in the late nineties and I was looking forward to some nostalgia but this is hard to watch. I had kinda blocked from my memory that most people felt they needed a computer but didn’t know why. The internet was so new, it wasn’t essential yet. We still used the phone book as a primary source. Most people’s internet was through America Online and you stayed in their walled garden. They still bought computers out of fear of getting left behind. I did a lot of free IT work for friend’s parents in those days.
> The internet was so new, it wasn’t essential yet.
The Internet wasn't new in 1995, by one measure 26yo by then, by another 12yo. And the Internet was essential, critically so, by 1995. It was the WWW that was new, about 2 years old.
The first web browser that integrated text and graphic (Mosaic) was two years old but it was Netscape that really kicked things off with the general public.
Netscape was only a few months old at this point.
Another essential component was real IP access by the end user. Up to this point your options for home use were sandboxed "on-line" services, telnet/shell accounts, or static SLIP service for power users. It was dynamic PPP and the emergence of dial-up ISP's that made browsers like Netscape usable by the masses. This started to happen on a wide scale around 1994-1995.
I washed so many cars as a preteen to afford a $30/mo SLIP connection.
PPP must have rolled out really fast or went through a few beta periods. I remember using it as early as ‘93. Our ISP gave you the option of SLIP or PPP when you dialed in.
> The Internet wasn't new in 1995, by one measure 26yo by then...
This is more of a side note response.
I often see a huge disconnect between those who lived during a period in question and those who read about history. I imagine that this transitory stage in computing was before your time.
More often than not, it's fascinating to see how... off, the readers of history are versus those who lived through the period. This, sometimes, becomes painfully clear when it is actual history for one generation but only a recent memory for another older generation.
I think the implied statement was: the internet was so new, it wasn't essential to the general public yet.
It very much was not essential to the general public and it wasn't until the www made it easily accessible for commerce that it became essential to the general public. But you are absolutely correct that the internet itself wasn't new.
So, I’m a first-level manager and we basically run an ad-hoc for our team that looks like a blend of spiral and milestones.
For me, the problems arise when methodologies intended for large-scale are applied at a small scale.
What’s a methodology for anyways? To help communicate and to reason-at-scale. If you can’t communicate or reason with a single team, process isn’t going to help. But once you have 200+, then you need process!
And my larger organization does have process, it looks waterfallish repeated every six months. I just don’t apply it to my team.
Spiral goes deeper once you get in. I got into a rabbit hole reading through some of the best practices and it ran into the same stakeholder management that is common.
It’s a fun historical count and I might write up some of the learnings later on.
Personally, I think we do our entire species a disservice if students can’t access free math education up through Calculus. Where it gets muddy for me is how much should be compulsory, especially if it generates math anxiety. I don’t have a good answer.
There are enough humans, and enough work. We need to stop treating all humans as one-of-a-kind unicorns, and see ourselves as a collective species again. On the same page, the opposite is somehow true. Maybe this sounds confusing, but I don't know how to state it better.
We have to face the reality that while all humans are equal at birth - something I firmly believe in - the upbringing may inhibit or express essential traits for certain professions. Some may have mathematical/logical talent by upbringing, some may have musical talent. some may be polymaths, some may be anxious for anything abstract. All have value, and the sooner we acknowledge this, the faster we can accept that there are people deserving more musical, more mathematical or more manual tutoring.
We can't treat billions of individuals as equals, they are individuals. They are not races though, or ethnics, those are dynamic.
Good luck designing your system! Sorry I don't have any advice.