Comment by dunkelheit

I actually have a lot of respect for old school game programmers because they have two traits that many of us who develop mainstream commercial software often lack: a) they care about performance and not in the abstract, but performance as evaluated by an actual human (latency issues in a messaging app are tolerable, a game with latency issues is simply not fun to play) and b) they can sit down without much fuss and quickly write the damn code (the ability that slowly atrophies as one works on a multi-year-old codebase where every change is a bit of a PITA). Sure, the constraints are different, but a lot of it is simply learned helplessness.