I love the change history comments. They show a high level of attention to detail and craftsmanship, at a time long before source control tools made this kind of thing obvious (and honestly, even after CVS/SVN/Git it still wasn't obvious to a lot of people).
This post also makes me think of the famous 'No Silver Bullet' essay[1], which in 1986 predicted that software would more or less continue to be written they way it was then, by programmers, painstakingly, one instruction after the other. The similarity of the game engine code (along with the comments) in the OP, to something I might have written today, bears this out, I think, almost 40 years (!) later.
When I became a lead dev, one of the first issues I had was a 55 y/o dev who begrudgingly adopted git but consistently included commits like: “Monday morning commit”, “changed some things”, “commit”. He also refused to delete issue template examples and included it all with his own additions.
In the entire time we worked together over a few years, he refused to adapt to the rest of the team.
Thanks for this comment. The parent comment came off quite ageist. As though the person in question struggled to keep up with the times. In reality, human dynamics play a big role in software quality. I wonder, could it be that the younger developer who recently became a lead both changed the team dynamics, and has not yet fully mastered the art of motivating fellow team members?
This post also makes me think of the famous 'No Silver Bullet' essay[1], which in 1986 predicted that software would more or less continue to be written they way it was then, by programmers, painstakingly, one instruction after the other. The similarity of the game engine code (along with the comments) in the OP, to something I might have written today, bears this out, I think, almost 40 years (!) later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet