Holy smokes... blown away. 1K RAM? less then most email's we write... Now'a days rockstars and Ninja's are the glorified ruby guys who "seemingly" do Ruby/django magic... This is what counts...This is the real deal...
The entire point of computers is to be able to do work that would be too tedious for humans. Computers exist so people can be lazy.
Making better programming languages so programmers can be lazy is kind of the whole point of the job.
Really? News to me.
Like the entire point of cars is to take you on journeys that would be too tedious to walk?
If you're ever in Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom, go visit the National Museum of Computing. They'll show you (and you'll get to play with) the Harwell Witch, a decimal computer designed to compete with humans who are using mechanical hand-cranked calculators:
http://www.tnmoc.org/special-projects/harwell-dekatron-witch
A well-trained human can actually outperform the Witch; for twenty minutes. (They tried it.) But the Witch doesn't make mistakes and it doesn't get tired.
It was only much later that they realised that computers could do things which humans weren't _able_ to do.
That the first computers were used that way, I don't doubt. But not the same thing, I'd say. The first cars were horseless carriages.
I was responding to a point above that seemed to imply that code like this can't be considered great (or at least, no greater than a Rails website), because its not what computers are for. They are for calculating things humans can't. I disagree with that. And not on a pedantic, language level. It is a genuine confusion, i think, between why something was made and what it can do.
Though on re-reading, I may have misinterpreted the OP.
why you're using this as an excuse to take cheap shots at web developers is beyond me.
If the ZX81 hadn't done anything of interest it wouldn't have persuaded those people that awesome programming was possible.
Dismissing this kind of coding as a side show is arrogant and ill-informed.
The ZX81 itself was a similar project that squeezed maximum usefulness and affordability out of very limited resources.
IMO this illustrates the difference between engineers and hacks. Hacks are pleased when code sort-of works. Engineers are only satisfied with designs that are minimal, elegant, and use resources as efficiently as possible.
This actually matters. Efficient coding influences everything from battery life to mobile data costs to cloud fees to data centre profitability.
Sure, it's easy to ignore. It's just not very professional.
I didn't dismiss it as a sideshow. My exact words were "low importance side project". It was a side project, as in, not the code he was working on full time for his business. It was low importance, because it was just a chess game, not a piece of system software or a business application or anything else that mattered materially.
Its possible to admire the skill and craft of a low importance side project and its author, and to be inspired by that skill and craft, and yet still acknowledge that it was a low importance side project.
When you slander me by accusing me of being arrogant and ill-informed you reveal your true character. You don't know me at all. You're eager to falsely attribute beliefs to me that I don't have and you're eager to criticize me for things I have not even said. You should probably take some time to consider why you feel the need to do this. Its pretty obscene.