Could they have been unnecessary at the time? Not all applications (in the literal English sense of this word) need this, and I think it's something we embrace

Could they have been unnecessary at the time? Not all applications (in the literal English sense of this word) need this, and I think it's something we embrace as we advance. After BASIC (which was obviously also my first, if I didn't mention it in the article already :D), I switched to a PC and used Borland Delphi for my first programming adventures. Fully object oriented language, with all the structural help you may want. And yet, my code was often repetitive, procedural, or just doing silly things (and variable names mixed English and Polish even within a single name). But it was a phase. I think a beginner programmer focuses on the goal and struggles with their way to reach it enough not to bother about the best, or most beautiful, or idiomatic way to achieve the goal. However, after a few years you build the awareness that if you're going to revisit this code in the future, you want it easy to read as well, and you may want to hide certain functionalities and operations behind functions, procedures, objects. The more time you spend programming, the more you appreciate structuring your code, then your application, then your entire architecture in a way that wouldn't hurt you in the future... or minimize the hurt. It's also a matter of the right tool for the job - an advanced programmer, writing a one-off script to quickly get or transform a result, may also decide not to decorate it with a sophisticated system of classes :-) I'd just write a bash or python script.