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John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

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Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#11

Post by zmmmmm »

Such a joy to listen to Carmack talk about just about anything.

Not sure if it's an age thing but there is a particular feeling common to contemporaries of that era, growing up in our formative years as computers grew from their humble beginnings to the incredible machines we have now. At that time, each new improvement brought astounding differences in capability. In the space of 10 years we went from 8k to 64k of memory, 4 colors to 256 colours to 16k colors to 16M colours. Resolution from 320x200 to 640x480 to 1024x768, which was close to photo-realistic (for the time, an amazing capability). I remember how revolutionary it was when I first got a computer that could render 80 columns of characters - rather than 40. Storage went from tapes to floppy drives storing a hundred kb of data to MB to hard drives storing GB of data. Every time one of these changes happened, a vista of opportunity opened up to explore and innovate and figure out what you could do with the new capabilities. Writing code in those times was all about deeply understanding the internal capabilities of the machine you had and how to get the most out of them.

Something about that process forged a deep appreciation for the fundamentals of hardware and software that I don't know how anybody could get these days.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#12

Post by NGRhodes »

Would loved him to go into more detail about his approach to coding and how debugging fits into the picture. I personally treat debugging as a last resort for when unit testing and verbose logging are insufficient. I can't remember the last time I debugged a scripting language, but I used to frequently did bug C#

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#14

Post by noisy_boy »

Couldn't agree more on the monitor real estate - the difference is day and night. Also, I am one of those developers who rely a lot on log statements. It is probably a combination of old habits (having getting started coding with shell scripts which don't have the kind of debugging support full-fledged languages have) and past difficulties troubleshooting as a production support person (you always remember those painful moments so now that I'm a developer, I want to make my logging as helpful as possible to my fellow support folks). Great point on debuggers though - I need to use them a lot more.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#15

Post by kajecounterhack »

zmmmmm wrote: post #11

Such a joy to listen to Carmack talk about just about anything. Not sure if it's an age thing but there is a particular feeling common to contemporaries of that era, growing up in our formative years as computers grew from their humble beginnings to the incredible machines we have now. At that time, each new improvement brought astounding differences in capability. In the space of 10 years we went from 8k to 64k of m…

One generation removed from that, folks got their start programming on the web. Some similarly developed great understanding about the internals of web browsers and how to get the most out of them. I don't think that's less beautiful :)

Each generation will forge deep appreciation for stuff higher on the stack. And there will always be folks working at the embedded boundary, forging deep appreciation for the folks who blazed the trail you described before them.

Also, to be fair, it's easier to learn stuff today than it was 20 years ago. You don't need to invest as much time and the resources are a lot better (yay for YouTube!)

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#16

Post by Barrin92 »

I'm one of the people he talks about who moved from diehard Emacs use slowly to more and more VSCode use largely due to the better UI experience around debugging and integration of a lot of modern tools. His point about features not being used when they're complicated to reach despite people claiming that they'll use them is a true observation in particular. You always can set up a lot of those features in your unix-style environments, but you're just not as likely to use them if the experience is somewhat scuffed.

As a sidenote I wonder if he's ever used Pharo, it seems like the kind of thing he'd like.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#17

Post by barefeg »

aborsy wrote: post #13

I am curious: how does this guy Friedman make a living?! His full time job seems to be running this podcast interviewing people. Every few days he publishes a 2-hour long interview. He distributes ads, I am not sure how much that brings in.

He’s a lecturer at MIT

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#18

Post by baby »

I've been trying to listen to the whole thing (it's 5 hours!), and there are some really interesting moments. Albeit, a bit too much talk on old video games that aren't from my generation, but I'm sure this will be interesting to some people to.

What I found interesting:

* he has insane hours and has never burnt out. He says that if you want to achieve big things in your life, you need to work a lot. He also says that as long as he's working, and making progress (and he always makes progress when he keeps trying, reminds me of Linus), then he can withstand his hours and pressure.

* he learns a lot through reading computer science books

* he is really big on simplicity, seems to appreciate Golang and its design, and he's not into metaprogramming on C++. I really like that he's focused on building things that work, and can be maintained, and not that interested in theory and advanced concepts that don't seem to bring him much. He also says he spent some time on the functional side, and that probably made him a better programmer, but he's back doing C++.

* he talks about the sort of hacking community he felt part of, where you just wrote code and shared it and reused other people's code. It really feels like open source is something else, made me feel bad about all these patents, and weird licenses (even Apache 2 or MIT) and academic people whining about credits. Wish we could just share and use whatever and be happy with it :(

* Agree with him, VSCode is THE IDE. It's much better than emacs IMO (I've tried using vim many times but couldn't).

* 8-9 diet cokes a day. Holy fuck. That's a lot of caffein (and I'm guessing not good for the teeth)

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#19

Post by jackblemming »

aborsy wrote: post #13

I am curious: how does this guy Friedman make a living?! His full time job seems to be running this podcast interviewing people. Every few days he publishes a 2-hour long interview. He distributes ads, I am not sure how much that brings in.

The same way Joe Rogan does, just on a smaller scale. 1/100th of what Joe Rogan makes is still an extremely comfortable life.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#20

Post by baby »

Barrin92 wrote: post #16

I'm one of the people he talks about who moved from diehard Emacs use slowly to more and more VSCode use largely due to the better UI experience around debugging and integration of a lot of modern tools. His point about features not being used when they're complicated to reach despite people claiming that they'll use them is a true observation in particular. You always can set up a lot of those features in your unix-…

Same here, sort of. I've been using like 30 IDEs throughout my life, and chose emacs over vim during the period I was trying to stay within the terminal, but VSCode is the best IDE I've ever used period.
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