I don't think your examples ever worked in the sense of doing anything useful. In very old versions of Snap!, we didn't catch this error, and so you got whatever Javascript gave you, which may have been an empty list. And then, we treat nonexistent items of a list as empty rather than as errors. The problem with this is that student recursive programs on lists with missing or defective base cases were hard to debug, so we now catch this error even though Jens hates catching errors because the error test slows down even programs without errors.
Yeah, but there is value and advantage to age: you treasure the things which are so good that they stay forever.
I just read a few days ago that www.grammarly.com/, a company that interrupts me with ads when watching youtube, runs common lisp to analyse grammar:
(Running Lisp in Production | Grammarly Engineering Blog)
Common LISP!
That is so 80s! But apparently still very live and useful.
The way I see it, the only silver lining to getting old is you already know most of the things that are relevant to your life, so it doesn't matter so much that you get too stupid to solve new problems. It's the opposite of young people, who don't know anything but are frighteningly smart.
(But it doesn't work for mathematics. They keep inventing new stuff that gives me a headache.)
(And also these days the young people have an unfair advantage because of search engines. So effectively they know everything and are smart.)
