"I would much rather see people spend time learning a Lisp language rather than fiddling with very old environments."
As a general rule learning is better than repeating, however there is value in those old environments. Primarily for a long time software was getting more complex than hardware could support and so there are a lot of adaptations that were made in 'old environments' to support better performance on under-performant hardware.
As we enter the 'post PC' era and get a wider spread of machine capabilities in the market place, it is always useful to have a few 'tricks' in your pocket for getting better performance out of your system.
Knowing that you got those tricks from systems that are now > 20 years old provides a pretty good patent defense if you get trolled. Especially if you can show that you, being reasonably skilled in the art, learned to do what you did using exemplars that are greater than 20 yrs old. That is a strong case for prior art.
As a general rule learning is better than repeating, however there is value in those old environments. Primarily for a long time software was getting more complex than hardware could support and so there are a lot of adaptations that were made in 'old environments' to support better performance on under-performant hardware.
As we enter the 'post PC' era and get a wider spread of machine capabilities in the market place, it is always useful to have a few 'tricks' in your pocket for getting better performance out of your system.
Knowing that you got those tricks from systems that are now > 20 years old provides a pretty good patent defense if you get trolled. Especially if you can show that you, being reasonably skilled in the art, learned to do what you did using exemplars that are greater than 20 yrs old. That is a strong case for prior art.