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Comment by dirtyagile | Hacker News Reader

Yikes. I would be scared to look at code I wrote 23 years ago.

Oh man, I wish I am able to look at code I wrote today, 23 years later. It's like going to your parents house and picking out toys you played with when you were 5 years old. Might seem like a silly thing to do when you're 15, but priceless when you're 30.

Parts of the D compiler were written in 1982-3 and are still in use.

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd

30 years!

It's sorta like our genes carry bits and pieces of the animals we evolved from millennia ago.

I recently recovered code that I wrote 23 years ago in middle school. It was for an Apple II BBS we ran for a little while.

To read source code (and BBS messages) that you wrote in 1989 as a kid is quite a surreal experience, to say the least.

I got the code running, too, thanks to an email I wrote to a friend on said BBS describing in detail how to edit the code (using the AppleWorks word processor), recompile the code, and operate the BBS from the console. Without that 23-year-old email there's no way I would have ever figured it out.

Last month I found, in an old box, a listing of the first computer game I wrote back in 1975. I thought that had been lost forever. I'm going to try and scan it & OCR it.

I recently found a 1.44" floppy with my first serious game, written in, ahem, Visual Basic. Neverless it still runs and is actually very playable and fun!

Now I wish I knew better then to shove it in a cardboard box and forget about it for so many years. I could have made some serious $$$ from it.

The worst part was reading the source code and realising that, despite being written in Visual Basic, the alghoritms are actually smarter and better than something I wrote very recently.

"With great system resources comes a great carelessness about ones performance"

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