I am going on holiday next week with my wife and daughter to a location near a beach. My wife and daughter both sleep in so I will probbaly have at least a couple of hours to myself each morning. What do you think I am planning to do with that time? Programming!

I will be programming in Turbo C. I haven't decided if I want to take my Pocket 8086, as it is literally the size of a small novel and has a few hours battery life, or do I take my Toshiba Satellite Pro 480CDT (Pentium MMX 233Mhz), that's much better experience to use, but is huge, weighs a tonne, and has to be plugged in...

Anyway, I think the fact that this is what I want to do, kind of answers the question of this topic? 😀

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2026-08-03, 21:36:

I am going on holiday next week ... What do you think I am planning to do with that time? Programming!

I'm the same ... if home or away, i usually wake up between 3-5am, my wife usually goes till 7 or so.
.. and ... my brain apparently works all night because the first thing I almost always have to do it go to my computer and code the solution that "just came to me as I woke up" about whatever problem I was thinking about!

I've got a few "travel" systems I've tried over the years:

Original PoqetPC - one of the first truly portables, 8088, very limited/slow, MS-DOS 3.3 in ROM, no floppy, USB or network (I made a serial cable for it and can DDLINK stuff on/off of it) I rarely use it these days (only if I want to test something on an actual 8088)

--Below have networking (WiFi and some have RJ45) and USB --

"Digital-2" 7" Win8/32 Tablet (Can run 16-bit code), PentiumDualCore, 1ram,16g flash, takes a uSD (have a 128g in it)
This is the smallest and works quite well - the one I take when I have "no room"
I have a Microsoft "Universal Mobile Keyboard" which can pair with 3(Dig2, Phone, AndroidTab, and a Logitech "Ultrathin touch mouse - paris with 2(Dig2, AndroidTab)

Acer W500 - netbook sized tabled, decent removable keyboard, Horribly slow AmdC50, eSata SSD failed and I've not replaced it yet.

2 x Acer AspireOne (early netbook) - WinXP 9.6", decent (but smaliish) keyboard, Intel Atom, 1Gram, 160Ghd, 2 uSD slot.
I still use them as test systems but if I have enough room I'll take the 1410.

My fav for travel: Acer Aspire 1410 - Thin as the netbooks, slightly bigger footprint, 10.6", nicer keyboard, Win7/32, Celeron-DualCore, 3Gram, 500G HD

I also have a "SurfacePro3" given to me recently ... but it's Win10 🙁

And a "bunch" more/bigger laptops that I never use when travelling (at least not now)

I absolutely love programming, but I also absolutely hate it. I've done some "impossible" things in my days, from participating in the demo scene, paying the bills (sometimes feels like an impossibility when you're on your last pack of ramen looking for a new job), and most recently the PCIe to PCI to ISA bus project that many said would be "impossible". I've probably written production code in over twenty languages. I've worked on games, game engines, systems, robotics, front end, back end, reverse engineering, FPGA, technical consultancy, etc. Pretty much if it has some type of code, I've likely done it. Except when life is on the line like medical, rockets and weapons. I'm good on that front.

I love the problem solving part, but I've recently (past 10 years) been super tired of the act of programming. I now think of programming as a means to an end, not a fun "hobby" you can get paid for. Whatever I can write in the smallest and shortest amount of time to finish the idea... I used to love programming for programming's sake like code golf, or performance squeezing but now I find both tedious. Maybe I'm just growing old, but to me programming was like the fun friend you hung out with that you probably shouldn't have, that friend may have helped you learn things, helped you get a job that turned into a career, but also made you stay up late pulling your hair out and got you addicted to hard drugs and now you're just trying to get clean and staying away as much as possible.

In a year, I'll have been programming for 30 years, the last ten of them complicated. Honestly I'm just tired of it. When I first started I struggled with the idea of not knowing what code to write to accomplish an idea, like how do you know what to type? Now, I have no problems with that, some would call that a mastery of the skill, to me it feels less like mastery and more like transcribing. The interesting part was never typing, I think it was "not knowing". Now an idea arrives more or less complete and the code is just the tedious business of writing it down. Half the time I don't even bother to convert the idea from brain to text. In some ways it feels much more like recognition. I don't "solve" much anymore. I look at a problem, notice which of the forty odd shapes it is, and reach for the thing that fits. That's a skill sure, but it isn't the thing I fell in love with. The struggle was the whole point and I didn't know it at the time. So yes, it's possible to love programming. I did, for almost thirty years. But I think what I loved was "not knowing" and the journey of figuring it out, but you can only spend that once in a field. That final "mastery" achievement might be the thing everyone wants, and for some it will suffice. For me it didn't; and I only figured out what I'd actually loved after I'd already spent it. I'm still looking for the love I once had.

For me, love is the wrong word but maybe that’s because I’m still a very amateur programmer.

I enjoy creating something unique. I enjoy the process because it’s me teaching myself. I never taken a class, I’ve learned by reading books or searching Google. I never used AI to provide anything more than an example.

There’s often many ways tackle a problem, and finding an optimal solution (but not necessarily a perfect solution) will let me do more with the cpu speed/memory available.

I enjoy that challenge but also sometimes the path I taking in the creation process leads me to a different outcome than I originally imagined. Yes, sometimes it’s a dead end but thats OK too because I’ve learned something.

The first program I ever made, I had a clear singular idea of what I wanted to make. No one else would make it, if I wanted it to exist I would have be the one. So I learned what I need to, and brought it into existence. That was 25 years ago. Now my programming is much less focused, usually I have a vague idea of what I want to accomplish but if I hit a major design hurdle then I try to ask myself - ok this design isn’t working as intended but can I change the goal and still use it make something else interesting. Sometimes I can.

So I wouldn’t say I love programming but it’s an enjoyable challenge. And that’s all it will ever likely be for me, a hobby or fun distraction.

Indeed figuring out problems is the most fun part of this hobby. (Something that usually happens when I'm lying in bed at night, not at the keyboard. That comes later.)

dartfrog wrote on 2026-08-04, 06:38:

I absolutely love programming, but I also absolutely hate it.

a good summary 😀

The problem solving, the finding of some elegant solution, the simple act of creation - its great
the weird bugs (that give no satisfaction in being solved), the need to continuously look things up can be frustrating
in the professional context the management of software development can grind the joy out of it

using LLMs is new, and honestly i find it handy as means to "look things up and give example of it working in context". You still need to have some know how though, as reviewing someone's vibe code will tell you!

I like efficiency in programming but i'm ok with speed to develop even if it means bloat as giant libs and debug info gets caught up

a lot of programming is now iterative scripting really

DaveDDS wrote on 2026-08-03, 01:06:

Not every hobby is for everyone - there's lots of things others "love" that don't appeal to me at all! […]
Show full quote

UCyborg wrote on 2026-08-03, 00:04:

No matter how much I do it, I always miss things and have to fix them and it's stressful ...

Not every hobby is for everyone - there's lots of things others "love" that don't appeal to me at all!

IMHO good programmers tend to think a little differently and approach things differently that "normal"s 😀

And none of this was helped when computers were "new and the best upcoming way to make money" - lots of people not what I would consider "top game" got drawn into that promise, and it showed (still does) in many products.

I think if you're not drawn to it (for the right reasons), it's best to skip it, counting on (and putting up with) the work of others!

I don't know, I did at least one crazy thing that can only happen once in a lifetime. The craziest was probably fixing one exploit in Drakan that lets the player move through the air (as human) with combination of movement controls, it was used in one speedrun video.

And I still want to publish some day what I did further few years after I published one patch for Interstate '76, added a trick to improve stability (hard to find memory management bugs). But I have to both go through what I did again and transplant it to expansion, so do it again for another EXE.

These are rather specific and not typical programming I guess. But more interesting than stuff at work. Nobody will reminiscence about the latter on the forum such as this one. I agree with your observation about disposability. I like stuff that works and doesn't have to be updated often, although things often don't work quite right.

Love-hate relationship sounds about right. The annoying thing, on one hand, I don't think I'm a total moron, on the other, there are many things I'll never wrap my head around. Modifying existing things seems easier. But the question "What am I supposed to write?" is always following.

DaveDDS wrote on 2026-08-03, 21:13:

Exactly why I created my own 'C' compiler - I always liked that 'C' seems pretty close to the flexibility of assembly without having to keep track of a myriad of machine specific details.
I've continued to use my own compiler for almost everything I've written (and it does nice in-line ASM when I need). I like that I know exactly what code will be generated and that it follows exactly what I coded (lets not even talk about that "++"variant of the language) - and over the years I ported it to over a dozen different processors which makes moving code around so much easuer!

I watched The worst programming language of all time recently. I always found C++ to be incomprehensible mess and never felt like digging into it. Watching this though, wow, it's that bad?

To help understand my aversion to C++ (and some other "modern" concepts), here's a bit of history:
----
I first "discovered" a computer in the 1970s, the univerity I attended had an IBM mainframe. I first "fell in love" with it using an interactive system called "APL" here I could "create things" prety much as fast as I could think of them.

I wanted one! - but home systems didn't really exist at the time, let alone one anywhere near as capable as that mainframe, let alone one that could run APL to any real extent. And build one was far to complex (I had made an Analog computer at one point before that - but it was a completely different thing)

So myself and a buddy took advantage of a thing a new company called "Intel" had just announced - almost a whole computer system in just a few chips - the 8080!

I built one - input via switches, and only your own memory/notepads and re-entering as a way to store anything. The EE lab had an EPROM programmer and I delved deep into creating machine language monitors etc.

I wire-wrapped a video display to TV ... 64 chars by 16 line (got it almost right - I only had 63 chars/line - but it was good enough). I also hand-made my first keybord - keys were pieces of dowel mounted in a roughly keyboard layout on a piece of word with nails and springs under so that you could press them down and make a connection to tacks in a lower board - encoding was a whole bunch of diodes to get it down to a reasonable number of bits - with final decoding into actual characters done in the system ROM (I really wish I had taken/kept a photo)

The university "language lab" had decommissioned a system (which not only provided boards full of the diodes mentioned above), but had several solenoid controlled 5" reel-to-reel tape drives - I managed to score a couple and although they were audio drives,build up a digital bit recording method and created software in my monitor (which was becoming more and more an OS) to store and retrieve "files" on these fully remote controllable drives.

--- So I came to know computers at a VERY low-level and the workings deep inside that most "programmers" don't. ---

In the process of doing this, I get very much into Assembly language which remains high on my list of most desirable way to program a computer (so much so that my ROM monitor developed an interactive 8080 assembler!)

But - doing all this code requires keeping track of a myriad of tiny details, there had to be an better way.

About this time a couple of clever guys at Bell labs named "Brian Kernigan" and "Dennis Richie" developed a programming language called "C" - I liked the idea a LOT - like assembler you could pretty much direct the system EXACTLY what to do without needing all the "little details". Looking at other peoples source code, you could know exactly operations it was going to perform.
(This kinda goes out the window with "libraries" - which were mostly well documented and what you would expect, but still this is why I am reluctant to use libraries I didn't write!)

----

Then along came C++ -- now native functions and operators could be redefined to do what "someone else" thinks is a good idea. Now the core source code itself become a "library"!

Not for me - whenever I want some sort of reusable general solution - Iwrite an traditional library - and of course this ability got plenty misused by people who thought the core language should be modified to suit their particular "whims".

But ... it has been a truly magnificent money-maker for the industry! When almost any programmer could grasp what a particular did well enough to find "bugs" and "fix" them in a few hours it was not all that profitable - now even the guy who writes it has to spend weeks/months just to figure out that particular system being used - but hey, 40% workability is good! Think of all the extra money that will be made by those who try to get it to 41-42%!

This is why I always use my own tools (and made a good living selling them - up until enough of the industry got "fooled") - It's great being "retired" now!

Btw and "just for fun" - I don't recall where exactly I picked this up (probably a C programming group back in the day)
- surprisingly I was still able to find it (took a bit of automated searching though my archives):

1                     "I Did It For You All..."
2______________________________________________________________
3
4On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview
5to the IEEE's 'Computer' magazine..
6
7Naturally, the editors thought he would be giving a retrospective
8view of seven years of object-oriented design, using the language
9he created.
10
11By the end of the interview, the interviewer got more than he had
12bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to suppress its
13contents, 'for the good of the industry' but, as with many of these
14things, there was a leak..
15
16Here is a complete transcript of what was was said, unedited, and
17unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat as planned interviews..
18
19You will find it interesting....
20
21__________________________________________________________________
22
23Interviewer:  Well, it's been a few years since you changed the
24        world of software design, how does it feel, looking back?
25
26
27Stroustrup:  Actually, I was thinking about those days, just before
28        you arrived.  Do you remember?  Everyone was writing 'C'
29        and, the trouble was, they were pretty damn good at it..
30        Universities got pretty good at teaching it, too.  They were
31        turning out competent - I stress the word 'competent' -
32        graduates at a phenomenal rate.  That's what caused the
33        problem..
34
35Interviewer:  Problem?
36
37Stroustrup:  Yes, problem.  Remember when everyone wrote Cobol?
38
39Interviewer:  Of course, I did too
40
41Stroustrup:  Well, in the beginning, these guys were like
42        demi-gods.  Their salaries were high, and they were treated
43        like royalty..
44
45Interviewer:  Those were the days, eh?
46
47Stroustrup:  Right.  So what happened?  IBM got sick of it, and
48        invested millions in training programmers, till they were a
49        dime a dozen..
50
51Interviewer:  That's why I got out.  Salaries dropped within a year,
52        to the point where being a journalist actually paid better..
53
54Stroustrup:  Exactly.  Well, the same happened with 'C' programmers..
55
56Interviewer:  I see, but what's the point?
57
58Stroustrup:  Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I
59        thought of this little scheme, which would redress the
60        balance a little.  I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if

61        there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn,
62        that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with
63        programmers?  Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10,
64        you know, X windows.  That was such a bitch of a graphics
65        system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things..
66        They had all the ingredients for what I wanted.  A really
67        ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and
68        pseudo-OO structure.  Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows
69        code.  Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain
70        your sanity..
71
72Interviewer:  You're kidding...?
73
74Stroustrup:  Not a bit of it.  In fact, there was another problem..
75        Unix was written in 'C', which meant that any 'C' programmer
76        could very easily become a systems programmer.  Remember
77        what a mainframe systems programmer used to earn?
78
79Interviewer:  You bet I do, that's what I used to do..
80
81Stroustrup:  OK, so this new language had to divorce itself from
82        Unix, by hiding all the system calls that bound the two
83        together so nicely.  This would enable guys who only knew
84        about DOS to earn a decent living too..
85
86Interviewer:  I don't believe you said that....
87
88Stroustrup:  Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most
89        people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste
90        of time but, I must say, it's taken them a lot longer than I
91        thought it would..
92
93Interviewer:  So how exactly did you do it?
94
95Stroustrup:  It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought
96        people would take the book seriously.  Anyone with half a
97        brain can see that object-oriented programming is
98        counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient..
99
100Interviewer:  What?
101
102Stroustrup:  And as for 're-useable code' - when did you ever hear
103        of a company re-using its code?
104
105Interviewer:  Well, never, actually, but....
106
107Stroustrup:  There you are then.  Mind you, a few tried, in the
108        early days.  There was this Oregon company - Mentor
109        Graphics, I think they were called - really caught a cold
110        trying to rewrite everything in C++ in about '90 or '91.  I
111        felt sorry for them really, but I thought people would learn
112        from their mistakes..
113
114Interviewer:  Obviously, they didn't?
115
116Stroustrup:  Not in the slightest.  Trouble is, most companies
117        hush-up all their major blunders, and explaining a $30
118        million loss to the shareholders would have been difficult..
119        Give them their due, though, they made it work in the end..
120
121Interviewer:  They did?  Well, there you are then, it proves O-O
122works..
123
124Stroustrup:  Well, almost.  The executable was so huge, it took
125        five minutes to load, on an HP workstation, with 128MB of
126        RAM.  Then it ran like treacle.  Actually, I thought this
127        would be a major stumbling-block, and I'd get found out
128        within a week, but nobody cared.  Sun and HP were only too
129        glad to sell enormously powerful boxes, with huge resources
130        just to run trivial programs.  You know, when we had our
131        first C++ compiler, at AT&T, I compiled 'Hello World', and
132        couldn't believe the size of the executable.  2.1MB
133
134Interviewer:  What?  Well, compilers have come a long way, since then..
135
136Stroustrup:  They have?  Try it on the latest version of g++ - you
137        won't get much change out of half a megabyte.  Also, there
138        are several quite recent examples for you, from all over the
139        world.  British Telecom had a major disaster on their hands
140        but, luckily, managed to scrap the whole thing and start
141        again.  They were luckier than Australian Telecom.  Now I
142        hear that Siemens is building a dinosaur, and getting more
143        and more worried as the size of the hardware gets bigger, to
144        accommodate the executables.  Isn't multiple inheritance a
145        joy?
146
147Interviewer:  Yes, but C++ is basically a sound language..
148
149Stroustrup:  You really believe that, don't you?  Have you ever sat
150        down and worked on a C++ project?  Here's what happens:
151        First, I've put in enough pitfalls to make sure that only
152        the most trivial projects will work first time.  Take
153        operator overloading.  At the end of the project, almost
154        every module has it, usually, because guys feel they really
155        should do it, as it was in their training course.  The same
156        operator then means something totally different in every
157        module.  Try pulling that lot together, when you have a
158        hundred or so modules.  And as for data hiding.  God, I
159        sometimes can't help laughing when I hear about the problems
160        companies have making their modules talk to each other.  I
161        think the word 'synergistic' was specially invented to twist
162        the knife in a project manager's ribs..
163
164Interviewer:  I have to say, I'm beginning to be quite appalled at
165        all this.  You say you did it to raise programmers'
166        salaries?  That's obscene..
167
168Stroustrup:  Not really.  Everyone has a choice.  I didn't expect
169        the thing to get so much out of hand.  Anyway, I basically
170        succeeded.  C++ is dying off now, but programmers still get
171        high salaries - especially those poor devils who have to
172        maintain all this crap.  You do realise, it's impossible to
173        maintain a large C++ software module if you didn't actually
174        write it?
175
176Interviewer:  How come?
177
178Stroustrup:  You are out of touch, aren't you?  Remember the typedef?
179
180Interviewer:  Yes, of course..
181
182Stroustrup:  Remember how long it took to grope through the header
183        files only to find that 'RoofRaised' was a double precision
184        number?  Well, imagine how long it takes to find all the
185        implicit typedefs in all the Classes in a major project..
186
187Interviewer:  So how do you reckon you've succeeded?
188
189Stroustrup:  Remember the length of the average-sized 'C' project?
190        About 6 months.  Not nearly long enough for a guy with a
191        wife and kids to earn enough to have a decent standard of
192        living.  Take the same project, design it in C++ and what do
193        you get?  I'll tell you.  One to two years.  Isn't that
194        great?  All that job security, just through one mistake of
195        judgement.  And another thing.  The universities haven't
196        been teaching 'C' for such a long time, there's now a
197        shortage of decent 'C' programmers.  Especially those who
198        know anything about Unix systems programming.  How many guys
199        would know what to do with 'malloc', when they've used 'new'
200        all these years - and never bothered to check the return
201        code.  In fact, most C++ programmers throw away their return
202        codes.  Whatever happened to good ol' '-1'?  At least you
203        knew you had an error, without bogging the thing down in all
204        that 'throw' 'catch' 'try' stuff..
205
206Interviewer:  But, surely, inheritance does save a lot of time?
207
208Stroustrup:  Does it?  Have you ever noticed the difference between
209        a 'C' project plan, and a C++ project plan?  The planning
210        stage for a C++ project is three times as long.  Precisely
211        to make sure that everything which should be inherited is,
212        and what shouldn't isn't.  Then, they still get it wrong..
213        Whoever heard of memory leaks in a 'C' program?  Now finding
214        them is a major industry.  Most companies give up, and send
215        the product out, knowing it leaks like a sieve, simply to
216        avoid the expense of tracking them all down..
217
218Interviewer:  There are tools.....
219
220Stroustrup:  Most of which were written in C++..
221
222Interviewer:  If we publish this, you'll probably get lynched, you
223        do realise that?
224
225Stroustrup:  I doubt it.  As I said, C++ is way past its peak now,
226        and no company in its right mind would start a C++ project
227        without a pilot trial.  That should convince them that it's
228        the road to disaster.  If not, they deserve all they get..
229        You know, I tried to convince Dennis Ritchie to rewrite Unix
230        in C++..
231
232Interviewer:  Oh my God.  What did he say?
233
234Stroustrup:  Well, luckily, he has a good sense of humor.  I think
235        both he and Brian figured out what I was doing, in the early
236        days, but never let on.  He said he'd help me write a C++
237        version of DOS, if I was interested..
238
239Interviewer:  Were you?
240
241Stroustrup:  Actually, I did write DOS in C++, I'll give you a demo
242        when we're through.  I have it running on a Sparc 20 in the
243        computer room.  Goes like a rocket on 4 CPU's, and only
244        takes up 70 megs of disk..
245
246Interviewer:  What's it like on a PC?
247
248Stroustrup:  Now you're kidding.  Haven't you ever seen Windows '95?
249        I think of that as my biggest success.  Nearly blew the game
250        before I was ready, though..
251
252Interviewer:  You know, that idea of a Unix++ has really got me
253        thinking.  Somewhere out there, there's a guy going to try
254        it..
255
256Stroustrup:  Not after they read this interview..
257
258Interviewer:  I'm sorry, but I don't see us being able to publish
259        any of this..
260
261Stroustrup:  But it's the story of the century.  I only want to be
262        remembered by my fellow programmers, for what I've done for
263        them.  You know how much a C++ guy can get these days?
264
265Interviewer:  Last I heard, a really top guy is worth $70 - $80 an
266        hour..
267
268Stroustrup:  See?  And I bet he earns it.  Keeping track of all the
269        gotchas I put into C++ is no easy job.  And, as I said
270        before, every C++ programmer feels bound by some mystic
271        promise to use every damn element of the language on every
272        project.  Actually, that really annoys me sometimes, even
273        though it serves my original purpose.  I almost like the
274        language after all this time..
275
276Interviewer:  You mean you didn't before?
277
278Stroustrup:  Hated it.  It even looks clumsy, don't you agree?  But
279        when the book royalties started to come in...  well, you get
280        the picture..
281
282Interviewer:  Just a minute.  What about references?  You must
283        admit, you improved on 'C' pointers..
284
285Stroustrup:  Hmm.  I've always wondered about that.  Originally, I
286        thought I had.  Then, one day I was discussing this with a
287        guy who'd written C++ from the beginning.  He said he could
288        never remember whether his variables were referenced or
289        dereferenced, so he always used pointers.  He said the
290        little asterisk always reminded him..
291
292Interviewer:  Well, at this point, I usually say 'thank you very
293        much' but it hardly seems adequate..
294
295Stroustrup:  Promise me you'll publish this.  My conscience is
296        getting the better of me these days..
297
298Interviewer:  I'll let you know, but I think I know what my editor
299        will say..
300
301Stroustrup:  Who'd believe it anyway?  Although, can you send me a
302        copy of that tape?
303
304Interviewer:  I can do that..

"Just for fun", eh? Wow, that was in 1998 and C++ was revised countless times since.

UCyborg wrote on Yesterday, 22:26:

"Just for fun", eh? ...

Yeah, I really meant "just for fun", not current, accurate of factual - I probably got it way back much closer to the beginning "++", and I have no idea why this conversation sparked a memory of it!

I've always kinda though of C as a "high level assembler" - "++" managed to pretty much removed that feeling - although parts of them look alike, I never considered them to be all that related!