41–50 of 74 posts
I program mostly in Objective-C nowadays, but I started professionally with PHP. When I first started Objective-C, I found it really constricting in comparison. In PHP you can do things a thousand ways, most of the terrible. In Objective-C, specifically with Cocoa, things are a lot more rigid and prescribed. I found this frustrating, but love it now. It's made my PHP better too when I do occasionally go back. It forc…
If he wrote a book about programming, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Too bad that even he probably is still figuring everything out.
He is definitely right about the social aspect of software engineering. But I think he sells a lot of the tools short. For example, he brings up things like Monads, Lambda Calculus, and whatnot - but then immediately dismisses them as not affecting what one truly does. But I think this really misses the point. In our industry it is really easy to disguise oneself as a professional (or even just someone who knows what…
> I would like to be able to enable even more restrictive subsets of languages and restrict programmers even more because we make mistakes constantly.
Which I think is perfectly in line with the rigid Haskell type system and philosophy of "making the compiler do 90% of the work". The constructs that Haskell provides are very down to earth ways of composing programs that ensure that side-effects aren't implicit and lead to more correct composition semantics.
"Other interesting sort of PC-ish platforms, we have... the Mac still remains a viable platform for us. The Mac has never required any charity from id, all of those ports have carried their own weight there; they've been viable business platforms.
I actually think that the Mac is going to become a little bit more important for us. Interestingly, we have a ton of people that use, like Macbooks at the office, but we don't have any really rabid, OS X fanboys at the company that drive us to go ahead and get the native ports out early.
But, one of my pushes on the greater use of static analysis and verification technologies, is I pretty strongly suspect that the Clang LLVM sort of ecosystem that's living on OS X is going to be, I hope, fertile ground for a whole lot of analysis tools and we'll wind up benefiting by moving more of our platform continuously onto OS X just for that ability to take advantage of additional tools there.
Linux is an issue that's taken a lot more currency with Valve announcing Steam for Linux, and that does change, factor, you know, changes things a bit, but we've made two forays into the Linux commercial market, most recently with Quake Live client, and, you know, that platform just hasn't carried its weight compared to the Mac on there. It's great that people are enthusiastic about it, but there's just not nearly as many people that are interested in paying for a game on the platform, and that just seems to be the reality. Valve will probably pull a bunch more people there. I know absolutely nothing about any Valve plans for console, Steam-box stuff on there; I can speculate without violating anything.
One thing that also speaks to the favor of Linux and potential open source things is that the integrated graphics cards are getting better and better, and they really are good enough now. Intel's latest integrated graphics cards are good. The drivers still have issues. They're still certainly not going to blow away somebody's top of the line SLI system, but they are completely competent parts that are delivering pretty good performance.
And one of the wonderful things is that Intel has been completely supportive of open source driver efforts, that they have chipset docs out there, and they work openly with community to develop that, and that's pretty wonderful. I mean, anybody that's a graphics guy, if you program to a graphics API, use D3D or OpenGL, you owe it to yourself at some point to go download the Intel chipset docs. There's hundreds of pages of them, but you really should read through and see what happens at the hardware level. It's not the same architecture that Invida and AMD have on there, but there's a lot of commonalities there. You'll grow as a graphics developer to know what happens down at the bit level.
Another one of those things, if I had more time, if I could go ahead and clone myself a few times, I would love to be involved in working on optimizing the Intel open source drivers there.
So, it's enticing, the thought there that you might have a well-supported, completely open platform that you could deliver content through the Steam ecosystem there. It's a tough sell on there, but Valve gets huge kudos for having the vision for what they did with Steam, sticking through all of it. It's funny talking about Doom 3, where we can remember back in the days when they're like, 'Well, should you ship Doom 3 on Steam, go out there, make a splash?' ... I'm like, 'You're kidding, right?' That made no sense at all at that time, but you know Valve stuck with it and they're in a really enviable position from all of that now.
It still seems, probably crazy to me that they would be doing anything like that, you know, but, it's something that's not technically impossible, but would be really difficult from a market, sort of ecosystems standpoint."
He is definitely right about the social aspect of software engineering. But I think he sells a lot of the tools short. For example, he brings up things like Monads, Lambda Calculus, and whatnot - but then immediately dismisses them as not affecting what one truly does. But I think this really misses the point. In our industry it is really easy to disguise oneself as a professional (or even just someone who knows what…
While I love what Haskell has done for me as a programmer, I don't think that it's finding the true semantics behind our problems. I rather think that it's finding a different basis. To take an analogy, monads and lambda calculus are like Fourier series. For many classes of problems, they produce a cleaner, simpler understanding of the solution. I'd hate to try and solve a boundary value problem with just Taylor seri…
Rather, what I am saying is I see a trend in the Haskell community where the developers strive to find the best semantics for a problem and not just stop at the first arrived at solution because it works.
See all the conversations on pipes vs. conduit if you want an example.
He is definitely right about the social aspect of software engineering. But I think he sells a lot of the tools short. For example, he brings up things like Monads, Lambda Calculus, and whatnot - but then immediately dismisses them as not affecting what one truly does. But I think this really misses the point. In our industry it is really easy to disguise oneself as a professional (or even just someone who knows what…
These statements suggest a view of science and math I find particularly insidious -- please correct me if that's not your view.
It's the view that software engineering should really be computational physics. All we need to do is figure out the laws, set up the equations for a specific problem, pick the best algorithms for the job, and hit Enter.
It's not unlike how the ultimate watchmaker created the universe. And best of all, there's no "monkey programming" (how I hate that term) in computational physics.
Truly romantic, and hey, I think I've just persuaded myself it's not so insidious after all!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. That would be a great book though.
Yep. Also, the smarter you are the more you tend to doubt yourself. Whereas less intelligent people tend to have more confidence in what they're doing. Bites me in the ass all the time.
One of my favorite quotes.
Standard implementations/algorithms/patterns are commodities and are purposely so.
Part of it is that he really does spend 8+ hours per day coding, every weekday, and has done so for 20 years. You'd think his experience level there is about as high as you can get, so it's always cool to hear him talk about the new things he's still learning at his work. I have to wonder if there's anyone else in the world that has both his raw ability and all those man-years of programming experience. It seems like most successful technical people end up doing management and business.
There's a couple of things people probably don't know about Carmack. For one, he can talk intelligently on a lot of different topics. A lot of nitty-gritty aerospace engineering, as well as the history of the space program and NASA for example. He's also up to speed on the latest across a wide range of technology, including things like cleantech.
Second, he has a pretty good sense of humor and can be quite funny. Which is surprising I think just because he spends so little time (effectively zero) out being traditionally social, which you'd think would be necessary to getting good at making people laugh. But in conversation he has a pretty sense of comedy and timing.
An example from his twitter feed that I clipped a while back:
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/167739644853747712 "Adding film grain, chromatic aberration, and rendering at 24 hz for film look is like putting horse shit in a car for the buggy experience."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. That would be a great book though.
Yep. Also, the smarter you are the more you tend to doubt yourself. Whereas less intelligent people tend to have more confidence in what they're doing. Bites me in the ass all the time.