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Low level is easy (2008)

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Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#51

Post by armchairhacker »

reidjs wrote: post #16
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.

Sort of :). Most of the games are “technically” playable, but not quite ready for distribution (buggy, missing settings), and I’ve never published.

The main issue is that I make most of the game, then realize that it’s really unbalanced and the controls are clunky and it isn’t that fun. So i lose interest. Probably related, I don’t really enjoy video games anymore because I get bored too easily.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#52

Post by armchairhacker »

dllthomas wrote: post #35
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.…

> if the engine has a bug, I can fix it at the source While this is probably going to be easier in something you wrote, note that it's possible in both Godot (F/LOSS) and Unreal (despite being proprietary they give you access to the source for free when you sign up).

Yeah it’s definitely possible but a lot harder. Working on my own code is easier than someone else’s code. Of course they would say the same.

Collaboration is a really important skill that i work hard to improve. Just not when making video games.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#53

Post by pdpi »

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…

> 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 painting GUI pixels and Javascript-framework-of-the-month.

I don't think that's the right takeaway. A decade ago I worked as an SAP consultant, and did some payroll projects in it. The display part of it was easy. All they wanted was a great big table display, the moral equivalent of a read-only Excel spreadsheet. No faffing about with CSS or Javascript or whatever.

No, the real complexity was the freaking business logic. Office workers, executives, contractors all had different rules for how their pay was calculated, there were all sorts of line items that applied to different classes of employee differently. The company had spent years building those reports by hand and there was a whole lot of organisational knowledge hidden in their heads, corner cases and exceptions all over the place. The sort of thing you can navigate in your head relatively easily if you've been doing it for years on end, but a newcomer has no chance of understanding - so a lot of iteration was involved in getting where we needed to be.

Put fiddly business logic and rapid iteration together, and you're burying yourself under a massive pile of spaghetti code in no time, flat. Trying to keep all of that sane both for myself and for whomever came after me was challenging in ways that none of the more systems-y work I've done since has ever replicated.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#54

Post by cgh »

pdpi wrote: post #53
jasode wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, 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…

> 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 painting GUI pixels and Javascript-framework-of-the-month. I don't think that's the right takeaway. A decade ago I worked as an SAP consultant, and did some payroll projects in it. The display part of it was easy. All they w…

Yes. This is why the much-maligned (around here) category of “enterprise software” is so hard and why the results are often kind of shitty.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#55

Post by makeworld »

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.…

You might enjoy raylib, a library for videogame programming.

https://www.raylib.com/

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#56

Post by wly_cdgr »

armchairhacker wrote: post #51
reidjs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sort of :). Most of the games are “technically” playable, but not quite ready for distribution (buggy, missing settings), and I’ve never published. The main issue is that I make most of the game, then realize that it’s really unbalanced and the controls are clunky and it isn’t that fun. So i lose interest. Probably related, I don’t really enjoy video games anymore because I get bored too easily.

Sounds like you've finished tons of games. The games just happen to be sandbox gamedev games - i.e., the engines themselves. Release the engines!

Also, you could just go work as an engine programmer in AAA or for Unity/Unreal/etc....

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#57

Post by spdionis »

jayd16 wrote: post #42
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…

>The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people is really stupid and unsubstantiated. I think the high horse is because frontend dev is hard. The backend has more methodical tooling. Javascript is not considered a clean language even if it has improved. It would be nice if you could use clean modern tools but the web is forced to support legacy browsers so it is what it is. I personally like…

I don't think backend people deny frontend is hard. The problem is frontend is hard for all the boring reasons.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#58

Post by majormajor »

klodolph wrote: post #49
majormajor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsensical. User input is passed to backends all the time, and results in just as many difficulties there. From SQL injection and other "untrusted input" problems, to dealing with migrating five years worth of user data to a new system because the old backend can't keep up, to trying to keep every piece of data in a consistent state. Look at CAP theorem: it literally says "you can't have a perfect system here…

I think the CAP theorem is a bit overstated. It’s not, “You can’t have a perfect system,” but “You can’t have a system which is both available and consistent during a network partition.” True, and interesting, and useful to know, but if “100% available” is in your requirements to begin with, you are doomed to fail and the CAP theorem is just more nails in the coffin. To me, the “you can’t have a perfect system” is re…

If your backend is frequently throwing 500 errors and "convince the users of your system that this is OK" flies with your management, sure, backend is easy!

But that's often not the requirement... 100% available isn't the requirement per se either, but "as available as possible because outages cost us $XXXX/minute" is. And pushing that number up is HARD.

And remember the context of this thread: we have a claim here that backend IS easy and that it CAN be "100% correct and bug free." Saying this allows for random-ass 500 errors whenever stuff is broken is such a huge copout as to make that original claim meaningless.

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#59

Post by majormajor »

mojuba wrote: post #38
majormajor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsensical. User input is passed to backends all the time, and results in just as many difficulties there. From SQL injection and other "untrusted input" problems, to dealing with migrating five years worth of user data to a new system because the old backend can't keep up, to trying to keep every piece of data in a consistent state. Look at CAP theorem: it literally says "you can't have a perfect system here…

A lot of the times the part of the backend that renders pages and handles user input can be assumed to be part of the frontend, I'm not talking about those. I meant backend as an API. I honestly think you've never built a decent sized, non-trivial mobile app for example, and you probably have no idea how tedious and difficult it is to produce something that will be pleasant for the users to deal with.

I mean, if you say "parts of the backend are actually the frontend"[0] and "parts of the backend area actually the infra" and say "backend" is just a CRUD api that talks to a database: sure, that can be easy. But I've rarely seen backend jobs that don't require touching the 90% of the iceberg that's underwater...

So it's a stupid definition. I haven't built a large mobile app, but I'm not claiming frontend dev is easy.

You're claiming backend dev is easy but your argument so far reduces to "it's easy because the hard parts actually aren't part of it" which is tautological and pointless. You're not even just claiming it's easy, you're claiming it can be built 100% correct and bug free.

What's the most complicated backend system you've built? What database, what user scale, what traffic scale, what technologies, what servers, etc?

[0] the part of the backend that renders pages, if one exists, and the part that validates user input should be VERY VERY different components, anyway...

Re: Low level is easy (2008)

#60

Post by vagrantJin »

valenterry wrote: post #14
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 com…

> Javascript is currently replaced with Typescript, which is not being looked down upon by backend people, at least not as much.

For some reason - unbeknownst to God and his prophets, very smart, intelligent folk want to use a BMX as farming tool to plough and till the soil. Now we aren't going to ask silly questions like - why use a bmx when you have a whole barn full of tractors.

No.

We are going to ask how to get maximum output from the pedal mechanism. How to replace the human with a robot so we plough faster and how best to install solar panels for day time power source as well as highly specialized lithium ion cells made specifically for this purpose, so we can cover more ground.

A farmer, who has been farming for his whole life, really belived the tractors with billions of man hours in commercial farms, trusty, easy to fix and operate with a plethora of mechanics to fix and improve them.

But that just gives the farmer a vague existential crisis, what really gets him in the dumps is how they get the the goods to and from the farm. See he has big lumbering trailers and a few modernis rigs. Hes been using them forever, they are insured and also have possibly the highest reliability of transport. The new farmers merely smirk at the diesel autos. They have sonething better, smaller, faster and many of it. Quadbikes hooked to trailers. Hundreds and thousands of them. Apparently a central computer, bless it, controls and orchestrates the many quad bikes. The old farmer feels lost and helpless everytime he goes out to harvest. His trusty harvester looks impossibly old and slow, steady as she goes. No matter that she can haul a few hundred tons a week, it is nowhere new sophistacted than the automated quadbikes - zipping in and out with their 80kg loads at break neck speed. It's like watching a symphony.

He wonders what they actually grow there. Seeing such advanced alien technology ,to him at least, these new farmers must be planting something more delicate than rice, yield higher than wheat, and sturdier than simple corn. Surely, he reasons, his life is all but over.

But is it?

The FOMO chronicles, Afseyuk, 2020

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