What I remember about C64 BASIC is that variable names were significant to only two characters. It was horrendous for any sizable program. What did people do

What I remember about C64 BASIC is that variable names were significant to only two characters. It was horrendous for any sizable program. What did people do for a development environment on the C64? I remember that it was not fun at all using straight Commodore tools. For example, the disk was unbelievable slow. At the time, I also had Atari 800- it was a much nicer system.