When I was fourteen, I wrote space-invader games in BASIC on a VIC-20. If you were interested in computers back in 1982, I bet you did the same. When I was 18, I wrote multi-user dungeons in C on serial terminals attached to a Sun 3. When I was 22, I worked deep down in the guts of a text database system — still C, now on a Sun 3/80 of my very own, with one of those HUGE bitmapped screens with a million black-or-white pixels. I was in touch with my friends from university: we were going to write compilers and operating systems and cool stuff like that — and to some degree, we did. We sent each other our in-progress code, complained about each other’s programming-language designs, and laughed at how inefficient each others’ completely unnecessary reimplementations of malloc() were. [I remember a friend’s implementation achieving something like 18% occupancy.]
That was then.
Today, I mostly paste libraries together. So do you, most likely, if you work in software.
