Well, it is age thing, because young people start they experience in current tech and only those determined enough can take a look on past tech, how it was used and how it evolved. Thats always was minority.. There are just 2 kind of people there: Those who belive and those who research.. ;)
Well, dunno what to say about it to you.. Its indeed sad.
Well the young people I meet know a mix of Python, C++ and C. And then they are those, who don't use C, because its too high-level and design their own processors instead. That's the current tech I experience directly.
Its cool to design sth from scratch, like its own CPU, but it only makes sense
if you really enjoy it.. Except, its waste of time. I myself live in retro computing abit, but it have it limits. Like, I would not go back to prised 6502 CPU. Yeah, it was great, legendary CPU, but if we take a look at even cheap options we can buy and use for hobbie projects, there are plenty of pretty quick and capable 32bit CPUs. Its hard to go below 32bit really.
Dont get me wrong, I pay big respect to demoscene, and what they can achieve on C64 for example :). Uber skilled guys, but this is an art :)
It might become part of his diploma, so I don't think it's a waste of time. It's about non-binary logic without a shared clock. I understand nothing, but to me it sounds pretty cool.
Well, dunno what to say about it to you.. Its indeed sad.