

Interview with PacMan Game Designer Toru Iwatani - kanamekun
http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-iwatani-1986-pacman-designer/

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opminion
It is a 1986 interview published in the book Programmers at Work, now
republished on the web 20+ years later by the author.

It would be interesting to redo those interviews again and compare... How much
the perspective has changed?

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watmough
It's interesting that the John Warnock interview, on Postscript, has not dated
in the least.

John Page's article, has dated somewhat with its mention of candidate
programming languages, but it's the one I searched out, as his discussion of
the philosophy behind pfs: File is one that has always profoundly influenced
me.

Link and quote: <http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/john-page-1986/>

>But here is the real “grabber.” The programs that are more difficult to use
make a selling point out of that difficulty. They turn it into a feature: The
user of a complex system can specify exactly where the columns go, whereas PFS
puts them where it wants. The truth of the matter is that almost anybody who
uses the more complex program changes the report five times before it looks
just right. Or else they put up with a rotten-looking report. I question if
that’s productive.

~~~
opminion
From that link:

 _Back then, five years ago, there was no C, so it was a choice between BASIC,
Assembler, or Pascal._

Things already changed quite fast in the eighties...

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watmough
And even then, there _was_ plenty of C, it just hadn't migrated down to small
memory microcomputers yet.

By the mid-Eighties I was doing some dev on C on the Amiga, and on Sun boxes
at Uni.

