We are so Post-Modern that we don't realize how Post-Modern we are anymore.
Call me bored, but don't call me boring.
Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.
You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars. You can't even think about them!
In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.
Younger hackers are hard to classify. They're probably just as diverse as the old hackers are. We're all over the map.