After a day of single combat with multimillion-SLOC tangleware, it's fun to work with a system that you can fit in your head
Personally, I don't do much nostalgia. I've built the PDP-11 clones and run v6 Unix again and (o dear lord) compiled world.c with BDS-C on CP/M and realized that the 70s and 80s kinda sucked, and that I really like modern computing
I have seen a pure C/C++ implementation of coroutines (it used setjmp/longjmp, and memcpy to copy stacks in and out of the native arena). Not the most portable of constructions, but it worked absurdly well.
Being able to write "async" code essentially in-line is a superpower.
I've been doing embedded systems in C++ since rocks were young, and this is a great summary of what to avoid.
I would sure love a good coroutine runtime, and first-class support for defer. You can do these manually, but language/toolchain/debugger support is nice to have.
(Pragmatically, I will be retired by the time they would be useful)
I miss my Q/A partner. He was a engineer who gave me feedback on designs and code, helped debug, and I could run the tests he wrote.
It's terrifying without that support. The beancounter level mgt does not Get It that it's cheaper to have this kind of support now than much later in the product cycle.
Lap-insistent cat made it impossible to use a keyboard. I finally bought a desk-height cat "tree" (maybe a shrub...) and put it beside my chair. He'll move to it after some scratching, and he's happier because he can actually nap.
I've built and maintained similar setups (10PB range). Honestly, you just shove disks into it, and when they fail you replace them. You need folks around to handle things like controller / infrastructure failure, but hopefully you're paying them to do other stuff, too.
Personally, I don't do much nostalgia. I've built the PDP-11 clones and run v6 Unix again and (o dear lord) compiled world.c with BDS-C on CP/M and realized that the 70s and 80s kinda sucked, and that I really like modern computing