I read Britcher's "Limits of Software", http://www.amazon.com/Limits-Software-People-Projects-Perspe... , years ago, he also started back in the batch mode era; his take was that having to write everything out first and the slowness of the feedback, resulted in programmers being much more careful and producing fewer bugs in the first place.
ADDED: This actually ties in a bit with http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846579 , "Working Hard is Overrated" and James Watson. I have a quote from Watson that I made into a poster back 25 years ago, "Never confuse hard work with hard thinking". Britcher's and to an extent, though they never made it explicit so I might be wrong, Joel's and Zawinski's view might be to think hard about what you are doing while you are doing it. This would also fit in with Joel's final claim that most people can't do successful duct-tape programming, because they just aren't good enough.
ADDED: This actually ties in a bit with http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=846579 , "Working Hard is Overrated" and James Watson. I have a quote from Watson that I made into a poster back 25 years ago, "Never confuse hard work with hard thinking". Britcher's and to an extent, though they never made it explicit so I might be wrong, Joel's and Zawinski's view might be to think hard about what you are doing while you are doing it. This would also fit in with Joel's final claim that most people can't do successful duct-tape programming, because they just aren't good enough.