Post-Apocalyptic Programming
> what if you are the only survivor with some programming skills sitting in front of a computer you’ve never heard of, with some hex pad to enter machine codes, with maybe some pen and paper. What will you do?Leave it on the ground and forage around until I find a computer that runs windows. It's not great, but, it'll do. Failing that, a phone and a solar charger.Charming as it is to build yourself toys 'from scratch' to play with, it's pretty unrealistic that you'd end up ever needing those skills in a real 'end of the world' or 'total supply chain disruption' situation.It's far, far more likely that you'd use off the shelf software, and your skills would revolve around being a cell-phone/laptop/whatever repairman, repairing old screens, charging cables, and other mechanical bits and bobs on hardware that was never really intended to be used for more than ~5 years; and ripping up 'no longer working' stuff for bits you can put into 'mostly working' stuff, and maybe building analogue circuits or maintaining power grids and solar panels.Electrical engineer, soldering wires types of skills, not writing interpreters and coding skills, is what you would need ...if, you were indeed, in the luxury of not spending all your time just looking for food and water.Let's be real. No one is going to sit around implementing an interpreter for some obscure cpu you found.That's a skill for idly bored rich modern folk and archeologists of the future.