[mtkd]

There was little enough memory to get an asm program doing anything material using HiSoft DevPac assembler let alone using a high-level lang.

The instruction set was very limited (in comparison to i386 etc.) so the learning curve was not steep and writing in assembler was, in practice, no more time consuming than using C now - once you were in the flow.

However due to the resource constraints you not only had to dry out everything into functions as you would with C today - but often had to manually mutate parts of the function instruction set code by poking in new values before calling to change the behaviour to avoid wasting memory on branches etc.

For large writes people would often move the stack pointer around as PUSH BC etc. were faster than LD at writing an address and inc(dec?) the pointer. I seem to remember IX/IY being avoided as much as poss as they were quite costly.