[hnfong]

> I mention all this to point out how intrigued I am by what looks like the emphasis that was placed back then on clarity from the human’s perspective, be it programmer, user or anyone else involved in the software’s development and use.

I'm not yet born in the 1970s, but I think the fact that "code is written for people to read" is something that people in the earlier decades knew intimately, and that we have "forgotten" in recent years.

It hinges on a very simple fact - we know that machine code is for machines to execute, and they had machine code for as long as machines existed. And yet in subsequent decades, people spent so much resources in designing/inventing programming languages, so much resources in writing interpreters and compilers -- it's got to be for a good reason, right?

Once you think of it that way, the reason is obvious. Code written in programming languages are for people to read (and write), otherwise we'd just work on the binary executable.

I guess these days in the stacks of abstraction, we don't even know what's running on the bare metal any more, and for novices it might feel like "abstractions all the way down", and the point that the abstractions were originally for human consumption might have been lost or forgotten.