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They developed these on a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10. It's not like they were editing/compiling on the C64. Of co

They developed these on a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10. It's not like they were editing/compiling on the C64. Of course targeting small systems does influence the coding style, but...

jerf 8y ago
A top-end PDP, according to that page, could address ~8MB, though I'm sure they didn't have it for a while; other charts on the internet suggest a top-end PDP-10 would get up to 33 mega Hz. 8MB for an embedded controller is no great ask and you have to crawl a ways down the spec sheet pile to get a 33MHz processor nowadays. A top-end PDP-10 would today put it roughly on par with an Arduino [1], although the Arduino would be a bit short on RAM. Even if you have the space to spare on comments and long variable names, you've been raised in a culture that considers those insanely expensive extravagances. [1]: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Products/Compare https://www.arduino.cc/en/Products/Compare
- abecedarius 8y ago
  Here's some code from the 1970s MIT Lisp/PDP-10 culture: https://github.com/dhess/rabbit-scheme/blob/master/rabbit.lsp https://github.com/dhess/rabbit-scheme/blob/master/rabbit.ls... The indentation and all-caps are not modern, and the MACLISP primitive names like TERPRI are unchanged from the 60s. Otherwise, the coding and commenting style would not really raise any eyebrows today. I first learned of literate programming from this culture instead of Knuth, e.g. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41983 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41983 ("The fourth section presents a completely annotated interpreter for AMORD"). I'm just saying yeah, expectations have definitely evolved, but it's not the case that PDP-10 hackers back then had not yet discovered or valued readability.
  - jerf 8y ago
    Yes, of course some people had that opinion. It was a fringe position back then, though. 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.
    - abecedarius 8y ago
      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.

jerf 8y ago

A top-end PDP, according to that page, could address ~8MB, though I'm sure they didn't have it for a while; other charts on the internet suggest a top-end PDP-10 would get up to 33 mega Hz. 8MB for an embedded controller is no great ask and you have to crawl a ways down the spec sheet pile to get a 33MHz processor nowadays. A top-end PDP-10 would today put it roughly on par with an Arduino [1], although the Arduino would be a bit short on RAM. Even if you have the space to spare on comments and long variable names, you've been raised in a culture that considers those insanely expensive extravagances. [1]: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Products/Compare https://www.arduino.cc/en/Products/Compare

abecedarius 8y ago
Here's some code from the 1970s MIT Lisp/PDP-10 culture: https://github.com/dhess/rabbit-scheme/blob/master/rabbit.lsp https://github.com/dhess/rabbit-scheme/blob/master/rabbit.ls... The indentation and all-caps are not modern, and the MACLISP primitive names like TERPRI are unchanged from the 60s. Otherwise, the coding and commenting style would not really raise any eyebrows today. I first learned of literate programming from this culture instead of Knuth, e.g. https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41983 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41983 ("The fourth section presents a completely annotated interpreter for AMORD"). I'm just saying yeah, expectations have definitely evolved, but it's not the case that PDP-10 hackers back then had not yet discovered or valued readability.
- jerf 8y ago
  Yes, of course some people had that opinion. It was a fringe position back then, though. 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.
  - abecedarius 8y ago
    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.