Is it not possible to switch back? I refused the Gemini offer when it appeared.

I was tempted to try it if it appeared again, but I need assistant to perform basic functions more than I need it to have a conversation.

Not everyone knew C.

Lack of trust: what was it doing behind the scenes? What’s if it just went and … allocated memory all by itself!!

Optimization wasn’t so good back then. People believed that they could write better assembly. For speed and size.

Memory was tight. C would include big libraries even if only one function was needed. If “hello world” was several k in size, that added to the suspicion (even though that was a fixed overhead in practice).