Expectations of complexity were much less in those days. Like, a programming language that is limited to 40 character variable names would be considered amateur hour, but back in the day it was prolly considered luxuriant. Also given the memory constraints, it also limited the amount of complexity you could put in your code.

More than luxuriant. Commodore BASIC (effectively 6502 Microsoft BASIC under license with tweaks) on the C64 only looked at the first two characters of variable names. It allowed them to be longer (don't remember how long), but would ignore subsequent letters.

This is getting off-track, but while the pitfalls of two relevant characters out of potentially many are obvious and only excusable due to technical limitation of the platform, insisting on more than 40 relevant characters is likewise contraproductive. Who (which human) will readily distinguish two character strings more than 40 characters in length sharing the first 40?

I feel often the need to remind programmers, that they don't write code for the computer. The computer will make it obvious, whether it understands you or not. You write for the poor sod tasked to maintain your code three years from now, when you're at your next gig.

Does namespacing count? com.mycompany.class.classfactory.factory.initializer.StaticGlobal

Sure you can usually use import/aliasing to narrow it, but sometimes you just need to grab some random global from somewhere.

>The original version of DOS that Microsoft bought to license to IBM for the PC was written in 6 weeks.

Is this actually true? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Paterson

When a book appeared in 2004 claiming that 86-DOS was an unoriginal "rip-off" of CP/M,[6] Paterson sued the authors and publishers for defamation.[7][8] The judge found that Paterson failed to provide any evidence regarding "serious doubts" about the accuracy of the Gary Kildall chapter.

Even a "rip-off" takes time to write. I'm not sure what you're questioning.

It wasn't a direct copying of the code, but the API was largely similar to CP/M.

I try to gauge the complexity of a task like this with a period view. On the one hand, BASIC was quite simple, and the 8-bit CPU had an instruction set that could be easily memorized (days before protected mode and 64 bytes worth of potential extended instruction decode prefixes!). On the other hand, debugging, code entry and documentation was sparse. (And there was no Stack Overflow.) So when I think to myself: How hard was this task compared to my for-fun projects? I really don't know what to think in today's inflationary terms. Thoughts?

Also, Spinellis' obfuscated C contest winner (the dds entry with LANDER.BAS):

https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#1990