That's a neat story and highlights how "programming" as a skill used to be much more about knowing the peculiar ins and outs of the physical hardware you were operating with.
Nowadays? A single piece of code you right might run on servers in a data center, laptops, phones, wristwatches, eyeglasses, video game consoles, wireless routers, cars, refrigerators,
extraterrestrial vehicles*, or even
juicers.
It also reminds me how
every generation of programmers has its gatekeepers…
Rust? Real programmers don't need memory protection.
Swift? Real programmers don't use Macs or iPhones.
JavaScript? Real programmers don't just work in a web browser.
Python? Ruby? Real programmers don't use interpreted languages.
Java? Real programmers don't need virtual machines.
Objective C? Real programmers don't use Macs.
C++? Real programmers don't need classes and exceptions.
C? Real programmers don't need structs and memory management.
Pascal? Real programmers don't need procedures.
Assembly? Real programmers don't need human-readable "words".
Machine code? Real programmers don't need, uhh, programs.
These are just a few "complaints" off the top of my head, and I've actually run into
most of these in my years.
I had one university professor back in the 2000s who was genuinely triggered by C++ (which became popular more than a decade earlier) and swore that it was a blight and that nobody should
ever need anything more than plain old C. This was when
Java was the leading language being used in course work and for instruction. So, uhh, good luck with that crusade, bro!
Of course, only
after I wrote all this out did I remember there's a classic XKCD for this.
Brainfuck and
Whitespace, though? Now
those are a real programmer's programming languages.
…
*
I was shocked to find the little badge by name name telling me that my code helped NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter mission a couple years ago. I'd argue my inclusion was more of a technicality, and there's a slim-to-none chance that anyone on the project actually read or used what I wrote, but I did contribute once to Python's "cpython" project, and Python was a key language in that mission.