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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/bl

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.