Programming has always been a quiet passion of mine, even though I rarely use it directly in my professional work today. Revisiting the days of BASIC, FORTRAN, C, HTML, Java, PHPBB, and later C++ with a little dBase III/IV, long before MS Access, brought back a strong sense of nostalgia. I still remember the era of DOS prompts, floppy disks, bulky mainframes, and the early Macintosh systems.
In the late 90s, tools like Photoshop and Macromedia Director were largely confined to the Mac/Apple ecosystem, long before crossing into the DOS and Windows world. Platforms were closed, access was limited, and tools felt exclusive.
Today, we stand in a completely different landscape, AI that writes code, agentic systems that reason and act autonomously, and quantum computing reshaping what computation even means. Tools are faster, smarter, and more accessible than we ever imagined back then.
Yet, beneath all this sophistication, the core remains unchanged. Whether it’s BASIC on a monochrome screen, C++ on a desktop compiler, or AI generating code on demand, everything still rests on the same foundations: logic, structure, flow, and cause-and-effect.
Surprisingly, a young student reached out to ask me about C ++ thus returning to arrays and functions instead of memorising syntax, it felt grounding. In a world racing toward automation and abstraction, fundamentals remain the constant thread holding everything together
Yes, I’m a little rusty (and I’m still learning Python, by the way), but what mattered most was this - the student understood.
That moment reaffirmed something I’ve always believed, technology evolves, tools change, but fundamentals never lose their value. And honestly, it felt good to go back to the basics.
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