If you could time travel, but only to the past and not the future, or vice versa, which one would you pick?

And bonus question:
If you were a programming language, which one would you be?

I would go to the past, because then I could be a pirate without having to worry about Seal Team 6.

If I were a programming language, I would be binary.
#original
#oldandwise
#hipster

I would take the paper with which Pearlman proved Poincare Hypothesis, fly back in time 10 years, publish it, get rich and continue as usual with my life.

I assume we would retain our current memories from present time in both scenarios. One thing that is unknown though is if we are able to come  back after a certain period of time.

If given choice between the two, I'd probably always pick the past. Even if your future self is living a fantastic existence, there will probably always be something you are unsatisfied with and I think as the a whole the future we are headed towards will have a tendency to depress. Going in the past, you at least can expect what will happen and things will follow out in the same manner as long as your actions don't impact the timeline largely as a whole.

I think this was a question in YHOPT a while ago, and I said just go back to 1990 and experience the 90s culture. Simple, low impact on the grand scheme of things, gives me some sort of happiness. If it's a two-way time machine, I can just get my fill, come back and that's that. If it's a one way, I'll just live far away from Ohio to prevent any paradoxes.

There's no specific point in the future to which you can go to and expect an exact set of circumstances to be true. I would just ballpark several random years in the far future to see if I can get one that closely my favorite futuristic/apocalyptic/dystopian fiction: System Shock, Mad Max/Fist Of The North Star, Blade Runner, etc. If you're going to bother travelling to a time with no guarantee as to how safe it is or what to expect, you might as well try to pick a crazy one.


C++, because I can decently understand it?

I would go to the past so that I could discover once and for all which religion/theory is correct

Does HTML count? I would be the most plain person around

I would go about 30 years into the future so that I could play virtual reality video games.

i would go to the future. the past is (for the most part) known, only the future remains hidden.
also because i'm hoping technology is much cooler then. maybe we've finally got an antientropy generator
my greatest fear is death, so hopefully they've solved that in the future

clisp and i are similar:
i don't fully understand us, but i like us.

That 4 month health project that's due next week....i'd probably start that a little earlier.

I would love to learn the truth about the cloudy bits of history, meet famous people, and watch as world events took place. In my opinion, history really stops being 'history' by roughly the 1970s, so I would want to go pretty far back, like the late 19th century. However, I think that the future looks much more promising. As technology gets better and better, so do our lives. I think it would be exciting to play a part in the 'future', rather than the past. My thinking is that whatever you do in the past doesn't matter, because it already happened, so nothing can change. I already know what will happen. But in the future, everything is still a mystery. Seems more interesting to take a leap into the future than a step back into the past.

Programming language... Uh, Python I guess. I did a little bit of it a few years ago and remember zilch, but whatever.

I would go back in time to the time when Neandartals lived, and I would live among them, finally together again with my kin.

I would be javascript because I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you don't deserve me at my best.

i'd go to july 20th 1969 to witness the live broadcast of the moon landing from a small monochrome crt screen. and i'd be lisp but i feel like that joke about javascript was not properly appreciated