[slowhadoken]

Knowledge transfer is a serious thing in important companies. Technology advances but it’s based on the same logical and mathematical principals. Techniques aren’t lost, they’re warehoused. I’ve rewritten advanced data structures that were purposed in the 1960’s, successfully applied in the 1990’s, and they’re still relevant and cutting edge today.

[ok_dad]

I hate saying that anything is no longer useful, but the commenter above has a point about how tech will get lost as it becomes outdated and useless. Your example, for instance, shows that those data structures were useful, because they were warehoused and saved in some way. You don't see people using a lot of magnetic core memory these days, even in space. Using a handsaw is still useful today, even for non-snobby furniture, because there are some cuts that a power tool cannot replicate accurately. A hand plane is still valuable in the workshop for many things. One thing you see less and less of today is a hand drill, however, because they are objectively less good at drilling accurate holes than a power drill of some type. I wouldn't call the users of hand drills snobs, because some people prefer hand tools for many reasons, such as being quieter, but they are definitely not using a hand drill to gain an advantage over power tools.

[slowhadoken]

I get that hardware changes but some of the most impressive projects I’ve seen involve the programmer understanding the hardware of the day. There are young programmers right now writing to the PlayStation 1. And again the principals of space and time complexity don’t change. Dijkstra wrote his shortest path finding algorithm in 1956 and it’s still useful today. But the idea of irrelevance still continues to throw fear into good programmers.

[ok_dad]

Well, I guess I was coming from a position that hobbies can be as irrelevant as you want and use whatever age of tech you want, whereas if you're doing this for a living you generally want to use the tech of the day. Sometimes this tech is old stuff that survives and thrives to this day, especially with CS concepts that won't really age (like data structures for the most part), however there is some stuff that just is not efficient enough to use for making money, sadly, since that's mostly about efficiency these days and not usually about doing things perfectly right, or even to any decent quality standard, sadly.

I, personally, use old and/or shitty equipment and techniques when I do woodworking, for example, like using chisels to make mortise and tenons rather than a fancy plunge router, or just skipping those and using one of those fancy Festool machines that do the "fancy biscuits".

When I program, I mostly use Python these days (don't judge me!) and I tend not to use third party extensions or libraries, so I guess you could say I use the "old school" technique of using the standard library for Python for everything, where if I were trying to make money I would be using `poetry add` for things like requests, flask, etc.

I think irrelevant and out of date tech can be used for making money, but it's a bit harder that way. I personally like using the "old ways" quite often in my personal and professional lives, and not trying to optimize my personal or professional life as much as most do, but I can see that I'm not the norm there, and most people just memory-hole old tech and move on to the next house of cards.