In reality it’s like a kid listening to the beatles, but with computers. I’m a younger millennial that grew up entrenched in ‘hacker culture’ and even then there was a clear fetishisation of the good ol’ days.

Like people using eMacs or vim these days

Not to start a flame war, but no, people use vim and Emacs because they're productive with them. I've certainly tried alternatives like vscode seriously and find I prefer vim.

Arguably you need a bit of fetishization to get started with them though.

Or just start early. I learned vi in Uni as part of our course and it's always there so I keep using it (but not solely).

In my case, it was using Linux distros pre-vscode that got me into emacs. In that era, your choices for general-purpose developer-oriented file editor were (a) emacs, (b) vim, (c) something that was ported from another OS and either running in an emulator or running atop a library stack that barely worked on your architecture and would take like thirty seconds to boot up.

Or nano/pico for the biggest, but there were other options available. Midnight commander has an editor, too.

vscode didn't exist when I learned vim, and Visual Studio was only on Windows, and I had seen demonstrated that people using vim seemed to be a lot faster manipulating and navigating code.

Amusingly, "they" is not one of the pronouns it prefers.

Feels like a passing of the generational torch as elsewhere in the thread there’s large arguments about pronouns while younger people who are way past that are out here getting into wide open Jenkins servers for active airlines lol

I think you're misunderstanding a few things, particularly the nature of commentary.

People comment mostly when they think they have something topical to add that hasn't been said. And pronouns are something people feel much more able to have opinions on that doing scans for open servers.

The vast vast vast majority of people of any age won't comment at all.

Good rule of thumb: NEVER assume that the views of commentators are in any way representative.

Didn't know you could tell someone's age by their comments.

Love this take.

Not sure if amusing but referring to someone as "it" makes it seem like an insult. I realize (per the bottom of the wiki article) that those are the chosen pronouns but still.

“They” is a perfectly acceptable pronoun when you don’t know somebody’s gender, or preferences.

Sure, but we do, half the thread is arguing about the validity of it(s) pronouns.

Consciously using retro design is very much a thing in industrial design, architecture, and so on; it only makes sense that it would come to websites, too (and indeed you'd expect younger people to be doing it; most retro _anything_ takes inspiration from a time period before the designer was around).