Feeling old at work

Today at work, I have been creating a diagram with TikZ. It's going fairly well, somewhat frustrating but the kind of thing I like to do. Years ago I would have rather preferred to use Basser Lout, that is a thing of beauty that, like Haskell, does what one hoped, LaTeX tends more to disappoint with various quirks when things interact badly, e.g., this works unless you're using beamer or whatever, however Lout never gained much currency and is now overly long in the tooth. This diagram's for a poster due on Friday. I hope to get at least another diagram done tomorrow, around other tasks.

Anyhow, I was thinking about a technology talk that I am to give on this coming Wednesday. I have plenty of freedom to choose the topic. I am tempted to try comparing a typical imperative solution for longest common subsequence with a purely functional implementation using lazy evaluation, I wrote one taking the latter approach maybe fifteen years ago as part of deciphering hand-typed locations in police reports. I don't know how easily my thinking on that comparison will make it into slides so a safe fallback is to give rather more detail about our CI/CD plans for our code repositories on one project that expands the simpler story that fits on this week's poster.

And, in considering what to talk about, it occurred to me that another thing I could still explain in plenty of detail is techniques for programming a forty-year-old graphics chip^*, my thinking partly being, Would this audience even be interested? Which, on the one hand, reminds me to be annoyed at the many recruiters who significantly penalize one's experience for having been back in the mists of time. I mean, I probably last used TikZ for something non-trivial at least a decade ago. On the other hand, it made me feel, goodness, forty years?! I sound like an old man, is the chip really from that long ago?

^*the MOS 6567 VIC-II, in case you were wondering