My fucking CPU comment was not that serious. The projects we were doing were just that. I have a notebook full of diagrams that I understand less and less every year.

It was just a bit shitty that the CPU part wasn’t included with the chip itself. IIRC the nicer ones had hardware CPUs/CPU cores anyway.

I meant it more as “hey I need to do this simple task, better write a processor real quick” which is not convenient. I’m almost certain there are dozens of FOSS RISC cores that could be burned to all of Xilinx’s FPGAs. It’s theoretically hardware agnostic but these are super popular parts.

(Using insane maniac as a compliment here; the world would be a much more boring and unenjoyable place without insane maniacs willing to waste their time making it a better or at least more interesting place.)

Thank you Sir/Maam, a better day was had here due to this...

VS Code is a vastly different user experience to Visual Studio though. Not exactly what they seem to be after.

I was a student and this was the first time I really felt like programmery things were paywalled. I think the licenses were per-deployment but free for education.

I think people who learned about programming in a previous generation may be more comfortable with things being very proprietary, and arguably the newest batches of people learning it in the slop era too. But until that point everything I touched had a free (as in beer) or free-ish equivalent. I remember the professor being very excited about the Chinese less closed down stuff, saying it didn’t matter that it was slower for a lot of applications.