Re:What is ZIL anyway?
by abecedarius on Friday April 19, 2019 @04:28PM
(#19702726)
All I'm saying is that the Infocom Imps developed on a computer that was plenty big enough for comments and readable names to be no extravagance. The sources above show it happened in practice and not just in theory. The company started after they'd been used to this kind of environment for years. (And they were at least adjacent to actual literate-programming pioneers.)
I'm not saying they were into literate programming, I'm saying it's misleading here to talk about what coding on the C64 was like.
It's less fringe today, but I'm still not sure "code should be optimized for reading, not for writing" isn't still a fringe position, at least as evidenced by what people's actions say about their beliefs, rather than their words. Lip service of that is probably at least not fringe any more, which is progress of its own sort.