Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipodonnell | Hacker News Reader

> In general, Infocom games were created by taking previous Infocom source code, copying the directory, and making changes until the game worked the way the current Implementor needed. Structure, therefore, tended to follow from game to game and may or may not accurately reflect the actual function of the code.

Some things never change...

EDIT: this is how I do most of my personal projects!

View on HN

And developer sense of humor about code quality remains the same...

https://github.com/historicalsource/zork/blob/70d16c9c817bc1...

That word "issue" used in the context of a printed magazine... seems like you don't hear it used much anymore.

I think the reference was to the function names.

Indeed, it even has a Y2K bug in it!

I wonder if that's how they developed Cornerstone.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_%28software%29

Just rip some code out here, change some there, until it looks like a relational database :)

This is definitely how I do all my LaTeX projects.

Well, they worked for them, so why should they?

I think the parent means that is still how we do software, eg. coyping resembling code and modifying it until it does what we want.

And I mean "If it works for modern devs too, so?"

The parent isn't saying it is bad practice.

For OP’s personal projects? Meh, it works but will sometimes cause you problems. For a team of 10+ software devs? Disaster!

I think this has to do with the authors being more literary than tech savvy.

Infocom was famously tech savvy though. The founders came from MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) where they developed the first Zork adventure.

The Z-machine is one of the technical marvels of the era. I doubt it. It was the Java of its day.

Nah, that's how I'd do it, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com