Recommended reading: How did people use ed? from Retrocomputing Stack Exchange, the answer by Raffzahn also includes an old-school programming story, How Real P

Recommended reading: How did people use ed? from Retrocomputing Stack Exchange, the answer by Raffzahn also includes an old-school programming story, How Real Programmers Remember Code. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5341/how-did-people-use-ed https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/5341/how-... > Using a line-based editor isn't that hard. For one, yes, real programmers (as we all were back then) do remember their lines. A program grows in your head; the screen is just to dump the result, isn't it? How are you able to understand your own program if you can't visualize it in the first place? > [...] Of course, these were all 'super specialists' and way better than anything we were ... the usual game. And as so often they came up with the same questions, why not use a high level language, a standard DBS and so on. The usual crap. Seriously, with an application of that size, writing such components is just a minor add on. Eventually needing less code than using a standard interface requires - not to mention being faster because being tailored exactly to our needs. > Anyway, let's go for the story. One of these 'specialists', lets call him Mr. W., claimed that no one can oversee such a large codebase, not even partially. Heck, no one can even remember all code written by himself in 5 or more years. Ha! That was a claim that I couldn't let stand uncontested, so one word yielded the next. Bottom line: we agreed for a bet, one beer, that I will be able (he said not able) to identify source name when presented a 10 line snippet, from random programs I did within the existing codebase. We agreed on 10 examples. Date was set the next morning. > Morning came, I didn't prepare nothing, but he came up with a stack of paper and a case of beer. I guess his intention was to show how much I didn't gain by presenting every fail with a bottle. Also, he was so generous as to make the snippets a whole page each. I didn't really need that. I named not only each routine he handed me, but also which module it belonged to, what's the purpose, some workings, why variables are named the way they are, some caller or what was to be found on the pages before or after. Further, I also named the original programer, as he inserted a few pages from programs I didn't write and identified a piece of code that was no longer used, told why and what has replaced it - he pulled it form a very old version :)) > The whole case of beer, bottle by bottle, changed sides :)) > The same time Mr. W. became more and more quiet. Needless to say that there was no further argument about readability of code or the ability to handle a large code base. Sure, there was still the database fight, but that's a different story.