There’s an interesting post from someone who worked on the codebase and argues the opposite[1]—some relevant quotes:

> we wrote fifteen million lines of 8086 assembly language. We had really good tools, world class tools: trust me, you need 'em. But at some point, man...

> The problem is, picture an ant walking across your garage floor, trying to make a straight line of it. It ain't gonna make a straight line. And you know this because you have perspective. You can see the ant walking around, going hee hee hee, look at him locally optimize for that rock, and now he's going off this way, right?

> [...] I went in and found out that some title bar was getting rendered 140 times every time you refreshed the screen. It wasn't just the title bar. Everything was getting called multiple times.

> Because we couldn't see how the system worked anymore!

[1] https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-s...

Discussed at the time (34 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=187365 and in 2023 (45 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36571956