This varies wildly person to person but for me, it's not only about the means. It's a combination of means and end. If I want the computer to do something, and the only way to get it to do so is read a book and tinker, the reading and tinkering are very fun. If I could just ask the computer in plain English (which I can now), I would. Of course it's way less of a fun journey then. But just reading and tinkering with no extrinsic element is not a fun journey.
i understand this very well. i’m trying to work through SICP but without a goal i’m struggling even though i enjoy LISP. on the other hand i’m playing Mindustry[1] in which you can use a kind of domain specific assembly language called mlog, and there’s very little documentation and no in-game console for error messages, so the code either works or doesn’t and you have to manually print assertions to understand what’s going wrong. in some ways similar to this article. we had an intro to 8085 in school but beyond that i would otherwise have never bothered to learn low level stuff, but i’m having a very good time now.
AI tools can write mlog but there’s not much of it out there so they frequently make errors, making it even more of a “you’re on your own” experience. i recommend the game anyway (it’s libre) but the opportunity to code this way has considerably added to the enjoyment for me.
That's not enough as the abstraction of hardware and software has increased exponentially. Not only that expectations are more. Just building for a definitive set of single configuration is not enough. Any software needs to run on Amd64, RiscV, Arm64, has to be containerised, and run on OsX, Windows, Linux.. Nowadays you would need more and more knowledge/experience to be able to function without external help.
Most Linux systems just symlink vim to vi, and it launches in a compatibility mode. Vim without plugins is still close. Old workflows can still be achieved. The user simply has to really want that experience.
Sure, but people could also just use BSD. The point is not vim or Linux. The point is that what the author appears to enjoy, a simple editor and a book, is easily accomplished still today.