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TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code

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Re: TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code

#181

Post by mikenew »

b0rsuk wrote: post #180
Buttons840 wrote: post #59

This makes me miss my early days of programming, where no code was too verbose or horrible to stop me from progressing towards my goal, no matter how misguided I was. Nowadays I'm distracted by the first hint that there might be some better way, and all progress stops. I think I'm just beginning to recognize this, and maybe one of these years I'll learn to recognize when the right abstraction is really important and…

John Carmack's advice (I don't remember exactly): "If you don't know which way is better, do it both ways and compare."

What if you're not sure which of 17 different ways is better?

Re: TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code

#182

Post by nnq »

nickbauman wrote: post #156
Iv wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I had to work more with teams and then supervising teams I changed the abstractions I value from when I was programming solo: Now I care less about my project's function than the structure of the team. There is a saying that any complex project will end up mimicking the communication structure of your organization. I must confess I thought it was silly until I realized it happened to us. I now favor code that has…

> allows programmers, these very territorial beasts, to have their own little realms they control My 25 years of programming experience says otherwise. The only place where this works is with good(ish) programmers who are assholes and must have their huge, fragile egos stroked or they'll throw a diva fit. I don't hire or work with those people anymore. Neither should you. Joint code ownership produces better code bec…

People need that feel of "ownership", not based on who made something, that's really bad and lead to "not touching Joe's code, no f way", and probably what you said...

But there needs to be a "Joes is responsible for the well functioning of microservices X1, Y2, Z3" - even if there may be 5 other people working on these same and others.

Also, people's "fragile" egos can be turned to your adavantage, as a manager or owner, but that is "black magick" and an oath I have sworn not to share its ways anymore ;) ...

Re: TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code

#183

Post by cel1ne »

Buttons840 wrote: post #59

This makes me miss my early days of programming, where no code was too verbose or horrible to stop me from progressing towards my goal, no matter how misguided I was. Nowadays I'm distracted by the first hint that there might be some better way, and all progress stops. I think I'm just beginning to recognize this, and maybe one of these years I'll learn to recognize when the right abstraction is really important and…

There's a way around that: First time, you do it "like a sketch", no criticism allowed. Then you can work over it. Every creative work that ever got finished was made like that ;).

Better finish 80%, than miss 100%.

Re: TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code

#184

Post by doesnt_know »

MBCook wrote: post #130
doesnt_know wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> porting Terraria (the actual game) from XNA to Unity Can you talk about this? What was involved? Why do it? Major roadblocks? Do you feel it was it worth it?

XNA is limited to MS platforms isn’t it? Is imagine it was so they could port/sell to iOS, PlayStation, Mac, etc.

Monogame is practically a drop in replacement which has multi-platform support/targets. FNA is also effectively the same, with a slightly more "purist" approach.

I honestly just assume that anyone that says XNA in the context of development in the last 5 years actually means one of the modern mono implementations.

Re: TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code

#185

Post by TeMPOraL »

Iv wrote: post #108
Buttons840 wrote: post #59

This makes me miss my early days of programming, where no code was too verbose or horrible to stop me from progressing towards my goal, no matter how misguided I was. Nowadays I'm distracted by the first hint that there might be some better way, and all progress stops. I think I'm just beginning to recognize this, and maybe one of these years I'll learn to recognize when the right abstraction is really important and…

As I had to work more with teams and then supervising teams I changed the abstractions I value from when I was programming solo: Now I care less about my project's function than the structure of the team. There is a saying that any complex project will end up mimicking the communication structure of your organization. I must confess I thought it was silly until I realized it happened to us. I now favor code that has…

I believe so too, but it's not even that much a function of team structure. A proper design will have lots of places that are mostly self-contained at various levels of abstraction - more than people you have in your team. I believe work should be distributed among those boundaries, because it lets people agree on the interfaces and work mostly in isolation.

Also, most of the time, small self-contained units of code are trivial to fix if the original developer goes under the bus, because small means any half-decent developer should be able to read the code[0] and understand it, and self-contained means you're not afraid to change things because you can easily track how the effect of your changes propagates.

--

[0] - an activity that people often shy away from, or are afraid of. Can't for the love of God understand why.

Re: TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code

#186

Post by stormbeta »

Iv wrote: post #108
Buttons840 wrote: post #59

This makes me miss my early days of programming, where no code was too verbose or horrible to stop me from progressing towards my goal, no matter how misguided I was. Nowadays I'm distracted by the first hint that there might be some better way, and all progress stops. I think I'm just beginning to recognize this, and maybe one of these years I'll learn to recognize when the right abstraction is really important and…

As I had to work more with teams and then supervising teams I changed the abstractions I value from when I was programming solo: Now I care less about my project's function than the structure of the team. There is a saying that any complex project will end up mimicking the communication structure of your organization. I must confess I thought it was silly until I realized it happened to us. I now favor code that has…

I refuse to work with people which such fragile egos, but I agree on the architecture.

Having a lot of individual pieces that connect using simple, straightforward interfaces is much more flexible and maintainable in the long run - it's the same reasoning that draws people to microservices.

Re: TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code

#187

Post by _uhtu »

Buttons840 wrote: post #59

This makes me miss my early days of programming, where no code was too verbose or horrible to stop me from progressing towards my goal, no matter how misguided I was. Nowadays I'm distracted by the first hint that there might be some better way, and all progress stops. I think I'm just beginning to recognize this, and maybe one of these years I'll learn to recognize when the right abstraction is really important and…

Earlier today I wrote a ruby script to go through a JavaScript file, find all ocurrences where a method was written in a certain way, and convert it to a new format.

I realized before writing it that there I would never use this script after today, no one ever had to see it, and it would never get version controlled. So i just wrote it in the quickest "get it functional for 95% of cases and throw an error otherwise"

It was kind of fun. Multiple parts had godawful big-O run times, multiple anti patterns, etc. But none of that mattered since it would never be used on a massive file and would never be in production. It took me back to that phase where i was young and doing pet projects and i could be as selfish as possible.

Re: TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code

#188

Post by TeMPOraL »

mikenew wrote: post #181
b0rsuk wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Carmack's advice (I don't remember exactly): "If you don't know which way is better, do it both ways and compare."

What if you're not sure which of 17 different ways is better?

Spend a few minutes thinking about the problem in order to reduce those 17 ways into ~3-5 ways, and then apply Carmack's advice.

Re: TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code

#189

Post by mickronome »

Done 15 years as a consultant, and that code looked much better than some of the code I've worked with. Even right now I work with code that looks worse in many aspects, although in a slightly different way. The code of the game is very obviously written by someone which at the time had much more passion than knowledge, but who tried his/her best anyway. It's a lot easier to deal with that, than with 3000 line methods of complete and utter madness written by people who really should know better, people who actually get paid.

Re: TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code

#190

Post by foota »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #185
Iv wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I had to work more with teams and then supervising teams I changed the abstractions I value from when I was programming solo: Now I care less about my project's function than the structure of the team. There is a saying that any complex project will end up mimicking the communication structure of your organization. I must confess I thought it was silly until I realized it happened to us. I now favor code that has…

I believe so too, but it's not even that much a function of team structure. A proper design will have lots of places that are mostly self-contained at various levels of abstraction - more than people you have in your team. I believe work should be distributed among those boundaries, because it lets people agree on the interfaces and work mostly in isolation. Also, most of the time, small self-contained units of code…

Re: 0 sometimes I wish I could just be paid to read and understand code.
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