[snips]
The characterisation "hell of a long time" may be exaggerated. If
you're at all aware even about the rudimentary concepts of
readability, symbolic names for magic numbers should jump up and bite
you.
Depends. If one's in the habit of, say, using 512-byte buffers for reads,
it is eminently readable to them; in fact, the use of something such as
BUFFER_SIZE might strike them as _less_ readable.
Further, there's a certain mindset a lot of people get into that says "fix
this, but only this". So they discover that, oh, magic numbers for a port
turn out to be a bad idea, but don't realize the same applies to the
buffer size - they fix the one, but not the other.
It can take a long time to really get bit hard enough by this sort of
thing for it to really sink in that it's a bad idea not just in those
particular cases, but in general... and even longer to get out of the
habit of using them at all.