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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

#211

Post by FPGAhacker »

sgt wrote: post #124
the_black_hand wrote: post #78

Vim mode on VScode is pretty easy. Msft nailed VScode by making it an easy electron app that gets up and running . An improved sublime.

When I tried vim mode on VSCode it seemed to have extremely few vim features. So it's basically more to get the vim keys. That was one of several reasons why I didn't like VSCode.

I suppose it depends on what vim features you use but it hits the sweet spot for me now. I frequently use macros and block editing, as well as tim pope’s surround.

I hit edge cases occasionally still though I can’t think of a specific one right now. When it happens I sometimes open vscode’s terminal panel and Do a quick edit in nvim on the spot without leaving vscode.

Vscode has replaced putty for me in my workflow.

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

#212

Post by justin66 »

Ciantic wrote: post #197
justin66 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 8-9 diet cokes a day. Holy fuck. That's a lot of caffein (and I'm guessing not good for the teeth) It's not that much caffeine and it won't do anything to your teeth. > Agree with him, VSCode is THE IDE. Nothing in that interview suggests he's ever used VSCode.

> It's not that much caffeine and it won't do anything to your teeth. I'm sorry, but diet coke (and most sugar free drinks) causes dental erosion. It's not the sugar that causes it, but usually the citrus acid. Even some flavored sparkly waters have citrus acid in them.

Ah! That’s interesting. I guess my only knowledge in this area (other than the big thing - sugar and corn syrup are really the enemy, I would have thought) is that the magic ingredient that differentiates Diet Coke and Coke Zero is citric acid. I never thought about the tooth decay angle of that.

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

#213

Post by borroka »

balfirevic wrote: post #174
bryanlarsen wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 hours a week is no life. If you can eliminate the average 90 minutes a day commuting Americans do, along with the average 20 hours a week spent cooking and cleaning et cetera by hiring people to do that for you, a rich person can have more life working 60 hours a week than a poor person has working 40. Carmack is a high level martial artist. That would have required a significant time commitment.

> Carmack is a high level martial artist. That would have required a significant time commitment. Interestingly, it might not be the that significant of a commitment in terms of raw hours although it certainly is in terms of consistency and persistence. Quick googling reveals that it might take around 2500 training hours to get to BJJ black belt (I guess if you're pretty talented). Over 10-year period, that's just un…

I think I got my jiu jitsu black belt with about 2,500 hours on the mat, say 5 hours a week on average for 52 weeks for 10 years.

With a more effective teaching model, I believe one could achieve the proficiency needed for a black belt in 2/3 of the time. However, this does not mean becoming a name on the world stage, for which much more talent and possibly more hours of practice are needed: talent saves many hours of practice that are instead needed by less talented practitioners, assuming that the latter can reach the level of talented people even in the limit of infinite time and youth.

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

#214

Post by [deleted] »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #115
jack_pp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he has insane hours and has never burnt out I think there's two major things you need in order to do that. Work on what you love/want and have no/little need for socializing.

I think the point he made was rather the opposite. He works 10-12 hours a day, 60 hours a week, 6 days a week. He needs seven to eight hours of sleep, like a normal person. He specifically mentioned that he never was much into doing all-nighters and that he experimented with working different times of the day. So he'd start in the afternoon and then continue until deep in the night when he was younger whereas having…

[deleted]

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

#215

Post by georgewsinger »

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…

> At that time, each new improvement brought astounding differences in capability.

Yes! There's a post we wrote on precisely this phenomenon with John Carmack as the main character that you might find interesting.[1]

TLDR: There was a time when people were willing to spend (literally) tens of thousands of dollars on ultra-premium hardware in order to compute on hardware a few years ahead of the market.

For example, John Carmack spent $23K for a NeXT workstation on which he made Wolfeinstein 3D, Doom I & II, and Quake. He also spent ~$10K on the world's first 1080p monitor, which he used to program the Quake trilogy.

[1] https://simulavr.com/blog/paying-for-productivity/

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

#216

Post by pragmatic »

todd8 wrote: post #165

I've programmed for a long time. One of the best programmer's I've known actually had his own debugger. He was an OS kernel developer and carried the debugger with him from job to job; we were working on the new operating system at IBM that would become AIX. He was a bit of a nuisance in the large development organization because he would wander around the kernel in his debugger fixing code before others had even not…

I’d love to hear more about this. What happened to this guy and the debugger?

I’m guessing he got fired and moved to a cabin in the woods. No way talent of that level can exist in a corporate environment too long. Too much jealousy, etc and the higher ups usually can’t stand someone who won’t play by their rules even if the results speak for themselves.

Hope I’m wrong.

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

#217

Post by georgewsinger »

An underrated John Carmack factoid is how he leveraged ultra-premium workstations (several years ahead of the rest of the market) in order to create the Doom & Quake series[1]. In 1991, before embarking to work on his early FPS game titles, John Carmack spent $11,000 ($23,219.85 inflation-adjusted) on a NeXT workstation. The story of his purchase is chronicled in Masters of Doom:

> On a cold winter day, Carmack laced up his shoes, slipped on his jacket, and headed out into the Madison snow. The town was blanketed in the stuff, cars caked in frost, trees dangling ice. Carmack endured the chill because he had no car; he'd sold the MGB long before. It was easy enough for him to shut out the weather, just like he could, when necessary, shut Tom and Romero's antics out of his mind. He was on a mission.

> Carmack stepped into the local bank and requested a cashier's check for $11,000 [$23,219.85 inflation-adjusted]. The money was for a NeXT computer, the latest machine from Steve Jobs, cocreator of Apple. The NeXT, a stealth black cube, surpassed the promise of Jobs's earlier machines by incorporating NeXTSTEP, a powerful system tailor-made for custom software development. The market for PCs and games was exploding, and this was the perfect tool to create more dynamic titles for the increasingly viable gaming platform. It was the ultimate Christmas present for the ultimate in young graphics programmers, Carmack. – Masters of Doom, pg. 93

Carmack also shelled out $10K to use the world's first 1080p monitor, which he used to create Quake I, Quake II, & Quake III:

> [In] 1995, Carmack spent $9,995 on one the first 1080p monitors: the Intergraph Interview 28hd96. This monitor was gigantic, but the extra screen space and image quality surely came in handy during the creation of the Quake trilogy. It provided a 28" screen with 1920x1080 @ 85Hz, a resolution not unheard of on today's hardware. Essentially, Carmack was able to trade $9,995 of 1995 money for a monitor that put him decades into the future.

[1] https://simulavr.com/blog/paying-for-productivity/

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

#218

Post by KerrAvon »

badsectoracula wrote: post #146
meitham wrote: post #10

I think his views are understandable in the lights that most games developments targets Windows platform, and text editors with GDB were for a long time not as mature on Windows compared to Linux. His comment on not keeping code in your head also aligns with the fact that most games development prefer object oriented approach to model characters and other entities, and that lends itself less toward reasoning about co…

GDB can work as a backend for an IDE and even in mid-2000s you had VS-like IDEs like Anjuta that provided a very decent interface. A little bit later Eclipse/CDT did a great job and IMO in terms of features it was better than VS around late 2000s / early 2010s. It did eat up all the system resources though (i used to have "only" 1GB of RAM on my midlate-2000s PC and until i added another 1GB i had to choose between E…

Xcode tried to use gdb as a backend for a long time and it was awful. It only got better when they moved to lldb.

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

#219

Post by pzh »

justin66 wrote: post #183
baby wrote: post #18

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 tha…

> 8-9 diet cokes a day. Holy fuck. That's a lot of caffein (and I'm guessing not good for the teeth) It's not that much caffeine and it won't do anything to your teeth. > Agree with him, VSCode is THE IDE. Nothing in that interview suggests he's ever used VSCode.

The quantity of artificial sweeteners (aspartame, sucralose, etc.) in that many cokes, many of which were shown to be carcinogenic in experiments with rats, can’t be good for him…

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

#220

Post by justinlloyd »

ycombinete wrote: post #110
huntoa wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that much caffeine, his 3 liters of coke contains about the same as 1 liter of brewed coffee. 1 standard can of diet coke (375 ml) contains 48 mg caffeine -> 128 mg/liter. So 3 liters (8 cans) contains 384 mg caffeine. Brewed coffee contains ~400 mg/liter.

400mg is the suggested daily limit . It is a lot of caffeine.

I should probably rethink my 8 to 14 espresso shots per day then.
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