Low level is easy (2008) • Hacker News Board

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#11

Post by armchairhacker » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

This applies so much do gamedev.

I’ve tried Unity, Unreal, and Godot. But I’ve never been able to produce anything, because there’s just so much to learn. Rigging, particle systems, AI pathing, etc. And so much weird bugs and workarounds. Unity in particular sometimes seems like it was hacked together, and there’s always multiple ways to do everything (DOTS, UI, animation), the broken “beta” way and the “legacy” way.

In contrast, I write my own engine, and even though I have to make everything it’s so much easier. All I need to know is graphics and code. My game engines are much more intuitive to me because I wrote them. And no workarounds, because if the engine has a bug, I can fix it at the source. Of course, this means I end up making smaller games and it’s harder to collaborate with others. But it’s better than no games at all.

With the like 20+ different game engines out there I know I’m not alone.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#12

Post by dang » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

It has been easy over the years:

Low-level is easy (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20568736 - July 2019 (26 comments)

Low-level is easy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7538150 - April 2014 (56 comments)

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#13

Post by woah » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

jensensbutton wrote: post #4

mojuba wrote: post #2

I have known this for many years but found it difficult to explain to others. Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people is really stupid and unsubstantiated. Though scalable backends are increasingly getting their own layers of complexity these days, but still, on the backend you will never d…

> Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. Evidence would suggest otherwise. I can build a decent and reliable frontend with a no code solution. That's not to say frontend is "easy", just that trying to say which is harder is ridiculous. They're different. I personally don't like working on frontends because it feels like getting on a hamster wheel that spins fa…

Seems like you don't know much about building frontends.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#14

Post by valenterry » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

mojuba wrote: post #2

I have known this for many years but found it difficult to explain to others. Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people is really stupid and unsubstantiated. Though scalable backends are increasingly getting their own layers of complexity these days, but still, on the backend you will never d…

> Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones.

That's actually true. What makes backends harder (or rather slower?) to build though is the longlivety of the data involved. Backends that don't deal with data are indeed simpler than frontends in my experience.

> The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people

That has nothing to do with the complexity. It comes from the fact that frontend is more approachable and also more hip. It attracts more "amateurs" or people who don't know what they are doing, for one reason or another. The result is that technology on the backend-side is more advanced and mature than on the frontend side - though that might be a bit subjective and not apply to specific areas.

You actually give your own example: "frameworks with millions of entry points" and a dozen new ones every year. :) However, I think frontend is in the progress of catching up - e.g. Javascript is currently replaced with Typescript, which is not being looked down upon by backend people, at least not as much.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#15

Post by mojuba » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

tux3 wrote: post #7

mojuba wrote: post #2

I have known this for many years but found it difficult to explain to others. Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people is really stupid and unsubstantiated. Though scalable backends are increasingly getting their own layers of complexity these days, but still, on the backend you will never d…

>If you don't believe me, UIKit alone exposes I think about half a million public symbols. That's interesting, do you have a source for this? For reference the Qt5 framework only has about 25k publicly documented functions and the shared libs expose ~100k symbols.

Honestly I don't remember but someone counted all the public symbols which included constants too.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#16

Post by reidjs » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #11

This applies so much do gamedev. I’ve tried Unity, Unreal, and Godot. But I’ve never been able to produce anything, because there’s just so much to learn. Rigging, particle systems, AI pathing, etc. And so much weird bugs and workarounds. Unity in particular sometimes seems like it was hacked together, and there’s always multiple ways to do everything (DOTS, UI, animation), the broken “beta” way and the “legacy” way.…

Do you actually finish the games? I’ve tried the DIY game engine approach before, but I never have finished a substantial game before because I get caught up in the weeds.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#17

Post by mojuba » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #3

mojuba wrote: post #2

I have known this for many years but found it difficult to explain to others. Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people is really stupid and unsubstantiated. Though scalable backends are increasingly getting their own layers of complexity these days, but still, on the backend you will never d…

Something I've noticed is that when you're building a backend, your program only ever interfaces with other programs. You can establish a reasonably predictable protocol. But when you build a front-end, you're interfacing with the human brain and all the messiness that that entails. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do well.

This is exactly why frontends are orders of magnitudes more difficult to build if equal quality standards are applied to both back and front ends.

A front end is a state machine that relies on a bunch of enormous framework layers. Give me an app, mobile or web, and I'll find a glitch or two in the first few minutes of using it.

Backends on the other hand, like you said, only ever talk to other programs. And that means building a 100% correct and bug free backend system is not such a fantastical goal.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#18

Post by yup00 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #9

nathell wrote: post #5

There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?" "An operating system," replied the programmer. The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said. "Not so," said the programmer, "When…

>, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design." I think I understand the intuition behind that... in other words... coding an os kernel seems to have less entropy, less degrees-of-freedom, less subjectivity ... than frontend programming like paint…

Exactly.

Dig around in C land and you’ll find 100s of opinions, even more libs and toolkits that came and went out of fashion.

Web stacks are “computing” to industry right now. In the 80s and 90s it was OS and database.

If low-level had the old economic attention, we’d see the same activity and mess as we did in the 80s and 90s. Everyone has a compiler to tell you about, and a build system DSL that’s just right for your problem!

But big corp largely controls that and so a new layer of abstraction was added via web, and we’re seeing a shift now to less UI, and machine driven decision making that just gives us the next step in the recipe.

Frankly I don’t mind technology for navigating human society; buying stuff and literal navigation.

I still unplug with musical instruments and the forest.

The addictive applications we’ve built in technology; games, social and multimedia, got really banal for me a long time ago. If I hear things like “Itsa me, Mario” or something about Halo I recoil at the cringe.

I guess I don’t want my psychedelic noise wrapped up in branding and consumerism.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#19

Post by mojuba » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

jensensbutton wrote: post #4

mojuba wrote: post #2

I have known this for many years but found it difficult to explain to others. Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people is really stupid and unsubstantiated. Though scalable backends are increasingly getting their own layers of complexity these days, but still, on the backend you will never d…

> Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. Evidence would suggest otherwise. I can build a decent and reliable frontend with a no code solution. That's not to say frontend is "easy", just that trying to say which is harder is ridiculous. They're different. I personally don't like working on frontends because it feels like getting on a hamster wheel that spins fa…

> I can build a decent and reliable frontend with a no code solution

Things that can be built that way are not interesting. Of course you can just assemble online stores without writing a single line of code, but that's not exactly programming. We are talking about frontends that have some sort of novelty or at least non-standard flows in them.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#20

Post by ekster » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 3:13 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #9

nathell wrote: post #5

There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?" "An operating system," replied the programmer. The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said. "Not so," said the programmer, "When…

>, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design." I think I understand the intuition behind that... in other words... coding an os kernel seems to have less entropy, less degrees-of-freedom, less subjectivity ... than frontend programming like paint…

Exactly, working at a low level still means that “the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas”. The different people are just hardware builders instead of library writers.