11–20 of 102 posts
Walter here! AMA!
Thanks for such a great game. I remember playing Empire on my Amiga back in the late 80s, it didn't have any of the fancy 3D graphics of my other games but I still played Empire the most. I still play a clone of it frequently on my iPad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for such a great game. I remember playing Empire on my Amiga back in the late 80s, it didn't have any of the fancy 3D graphics of my other games but I still played Empire the most. I still play a clone of it frequently on my iPad.
Graphics are great for initial attraction to a game, but it's the gameplay that keeps one's interest. It's similar to movies. Special effects are momentarily interesting, but it's the plot that overwhelmingly matters.
Walter here! AMA!
Walter here! AMA!
Were you involved with the DOS version of the game? A friend in university had a copy of it on the DOS machine we used to type papers and I got rapidly sucked in after discovering it.
Walter here! AMA!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Walter -- you've been in the game a long, long time. One of the first (the first?) commercial C++ compilers. 1. As a 20-something whose first (real) experience coding was Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts/take on "lessons we've forgotten" or things programmers nowadays think is something new, but is just an old thing being re-discovered/re-branded. 2. Also interested to hear…
Thanks for your thoughts. I'm not sure about lessons forgotten, but there are definitely lessons never learned. One is the use of macros in programming languages. Macros are one of those great ideas that seem almost miraculous. They provide immense power to the programmer. Unfortunately, the dahk side of macros inevitably consumes the user. The macros inevitably become so confusing, pervasive and complex that the aut…
This is not limited to macros, but any abstraction.
Let's step back and rewrite the quote:
> The abstractions inevitably become so confusing, pervasive and complex that the author winds up inventing his own undocumented mess of a language, unusable for anyone else.
The key fault that trips up so many talented programmers (if not all) at least some point during their career (and hopefully not continuously, though I certainly know a few cases) is confusing convenience with simple. Convenience is almost always more complex, not simpler. Macros happen to wear their complex hearts on their sleeves.
You can address any of these problems by _addressing the problems_ you succinctly listed: documentation and usability.
Take React for example. It's an abstraction, arguably a new "language", and requires ample documentation and usability concessions to be palatable. You could accomplish this with macros as well.
But like any abstraction, the real problems arise during maintenance, and thus it becomes a Software Engineering problem -- whatever that means. This is where Software Engineering as a poorly-defined pseudo-profession has failed to demarcate itself from simple programming: the quality, maintenance and longevity of living code bases.
The masses unfortunately still don't see the forest for the trees, so I agree that it's something we've never seemed to learn, if perhaps using a broader definition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Walter -- you've been in the game a long, long time. One of the first (the first?) commercial C++ compilers. 1. As a 20-something whose first (real) experience coding was Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts/take on "lessons we've forgotten" or things programmers nowadays think is something new, but is just an old thing being re-discovered/re-branded. 2. Also interested to hear…
Thanks for your thoughts. I'm not sure about lessons forgotten, but there are definitely lessons never learned. One is the use of macros in programming languages. Macros are one of those great ideas that seem almost miraculous. They provide immense power to the programmer. Unfortunately, the dahk side of macros inevitably consumes the user. The macros inevitably become so confusing, pervasive and complex that the aut…
> "Unfortunately, the dahk side of macros inevitably consumes the user. The macros inevitably become so confusing, pervasive and complex that the author winds up inventing his own undocumented mess of a language, unusable for anyone else."
I am very sparing even when using mixins/template mixins in D -- the second you do, it ratchets the debugging difficulty up to "11" and becomes am order of magnitude harder to reason about program state.
Great power, great responsibility. I'm an "avoid at all costs" kind of guy, unless you can really justify it.
If C++ didn't have macros (which invariably get abused, along with templates) I think I might not hate it so much. Let us pray that the "constexpr" idea they "borrowed" from you may slowly fix this a little over time ;)
I went through a phase earlier in my dev career where I thought "Metaprogramming is so powerful and cool!", and I've put that behind me now. I just want boring, easy-to-read + maintain, predictable code.
Ironically I used to poke fun at Java and .NET but I've come to appreciate the "stupidity". "Dumb" is easy to understand, "dumb" is easy to maintain. "Clever" is bad.
> "My friend said "I can fix that" and fixed the bug and checked it in in two hours. The manager, astonished, asked him how he figured it out. He said "I didn't figure it out. I disassembled the object code using Walter's disassembler that turns it into assembler source code, found the bug, fixed it, and checked in the new asm source code!""
I suppose while I'm at it, I ought to thank you for all the Digital Mars tools that myself and many others still use today:
https://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/ctg.html
The Digital Mars tools for working with PE/COFF files and libs/binaries are indispensable. I suppose they've helped many tens of thousands of people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were you involved with the DOS version of the game? A friend in university had a copy of it on the DOS machine we used to type papers and I got rapidly sucked in after discovering it.
The character mode DOS game I wrote. The graphics one was converted from text to graphics by Mark Baldwin.
Walter here! AMA!