Development quotes of the week

It’s very strange to the modern eye just to see a simulation like ADVENT written with no analogue even of C structures, let alone objects. But the FORTRAN Crowther wrote in didn’t have such things; game state was all global variables, a “feature” preserved in the mechanically translated C of 2.5. (Which, alas, is extremely ugly code full of gotos.)

It also looks odd, 40 years after the fact, to see the amount of code complexity devoted to space/time optimization so that (for example) you don’t have to re-parse the text master of the dungeon-defining database on every startup. That’s what you had to do then, when a room-filling minicomputer cranked many fewer instructions per second than the controller in your microwave oven.

With snaps vs docker/OCI and snaps vs FlatPak vs AppImage emerging as new variations of the longstanding "deb vs RPM vs something else" arguments, "Here's a source tarball, y'all have fun now" remains the most sensible publication approach for relatively low level operating system components like CPython.

It's not a sleek, smooth, finished tool. It's clunky, weird, and probably not what you want. But it's what I want.