He sounds pretty sad.
Most people are pretty sad when their family members commit suicide.
The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame
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Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame
#92> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…
I have a feeling Markus is referring to typing in machine code (in a totally opaque way) using DATA statements combined with a small loader written in Basic.[1] Here's an article discussing this approach.[2] This was very common in the computer magazines during the 80s. You learn a lot about patience and attention to detail, if nothing else. There were attempts to mitigate this..[3]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-in_program
[2] http://www.atariarchives.org/mlb/introduction.php
[3] http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/08/experiments-in-airbo...
Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame
#93"Last year, Persson earned over a hundred million dollars from the game and its merchandise." If you made that kind of money, why would you even bother to do anything but just retire and enjoy life?
In some sense, enjoying life is hard when you have lots of money. It gives you lots of options, and you cannot do all you would ever want to do.
Say, you are a programmer, and you are enjoying your work. Would you enjoy yourself more riding a Ferrari today? Sitting on some Caribbean beach? Following your favourite NBA team by going to all their games? Study medicine? Start a charity? How do you know you would stay happy doing that? Would you feel guilty spending your life lying on a beach, where you might have written some useful software instead?
Most people would shrug of those ideas or not even think about them because "that's life". If you have a hundred million in the bank, though, all of these are realistic options.
If money is no objection, some feel that they really are themselves to blame if they aren't happy for a minute or don't accomplish anything they feel valuable in the rest of their lives.
Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's kind of weird to think that no-one gets their start like this anymore. I've gotten bug reports for Hackety Hack where people say "I can't copy and paste from the lessons. Can you fix that?" I reply (obviously at more length and warmth) "Working as intended."
Reminds me of Zed Shaw's Learn Code The Hard Way approach: > You must type each of these exercises in, manually. If you copy and paste, you might as well just not even do them. The point of these exercises is to train your hands, your brain, and your mind in how to read, write, and see code. If you copy-paste, you are cheating yourself out of the effectiveness of the lessons.
I don't know about that, but you do need to at least interact with the code on some level, eg. by cut+pasting, then playing around with the code to make it do different things.
Also, I don't know many professional programmers who type everything in by hand. It'll be something copied from a previous project, or cribbed from the documentation / somewhere online, then hacked into shape.
Of course, in order to do any of that you need to understand what's going on, but there might be easier ways to do that than manually typing in code.
Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame
#95Another finely written newspaper article about indie game development / mindsets involved, titled "Where Do Dwarf-Eating Carp Come From? / The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress", centering around the two brothers, mainly focusing on Tarn Adams:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of...
Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
24. Even though we always had a computer at home, I never got into programming and spent most of my time playing games. (The learning curve was too steep, and besides, what could I possibly make that was better than the games I was playing?) Then when I got to college I majored in CS. Now I'm definitely interested in making games. :) In my opinion, the abundance of dynamic and interpreted languages, powerful tools, p…
But even you - a smart capable person who likes computers - didn't do so because you already had all the games you needed. Those home computers? You load a game, or you start programming. Since loading a game often meant fiddling around with a tape cassette and cable, and a few minutes hoping it would load, it's easy to see why people decided to try to code themselves. I know abstraction is a good thing. I know it's…
As a counterpoint, I'm 20 and I started programming exactly because I was playing around with extending a game (Neverwinter Nights was the game), which involved using the built-in tools to make new levels/worlds but getting elaborate behaviour required scripting in a C-like language.
I remember being utterly confused by what a statement beginning with "while" did, but eventually I was reasonable enough to mostly implement a (very weak) checkers-playing AI.
This then lead to programming Lego robots in C, which was pretty neat. (Actually, thinking about that, the first programming I did was using the graphical LabView thing that Lego provides for Mindstorms robots.)
Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was 14, I started learning C from a book that built around this premise. I think it was called "Type & Learn C." It worked - by the end of the summer I was a somewhat proficient C programmer. I still think it's kind of amazing how such simple advice can be so effective. I often find that when I'm struggling to grok a new language or framework, that I've forgotten to hand-type at least a few examples.
Here's my current working hypothesis. The part of the body that learns how to program[1] doesn't speak English. You hear it even in the metaphors programmers use: code smell, this "feels" like a recursive problem, "listen to your code," etc. That means to learn as quickly as you can you want as many parts of your body involved -- the English-speaking part, your muscles, your eyes, your memories of all the times you'v…
Alternatively, maybe you should get your English-speaking part out of the way and let your brain "absorb" code patterns as you read or type them, without overthinking it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzR8x5MgvDw
Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame
#98> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…
This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?
23. My foray into coding started by playing with game's level editors (such as Tomb Raider, Elder Scrolls and Warcraft 3). There was a lot of visual abstraction, but you could go deeper down if you wanted to. Then onto Game Maker. It was actually cool to see all my 'code' going from visual blocks in it, to just using the built-in script (over a series of games). Learned a lot from it!
Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame
#99> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…
This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?
26 here. I didn't get into programming until a couple years ago.
As a kid, I was never really exposed to programming. It wasn't offered in middle school or high school. It just so happened that I was never prompted to try it. I majored in something non-technical, and didn't write my first 'for' loop til I was 24.
Which is a shame, because as a kid I totally would have loved it. If only there was one class, one teacher, one person, somewhere, telling me to try programming -- I would have tried it, most likely, if someone pushed me.
Oh well. As a grown up, I've discovered programming, I have a job doing programming, and I love it.
Re: The Minecraft Creator Markus Persson Faces Life After Fame
#100> “I have the ability to get code done, but I’m impatient and it’s scrappy as a result. Maybe that helped me with Minecraft, as it came quickly. But, well, at some point, I’d like to actually become a good programmer.” It's amazing that he doesn't consider himself to be a good programmer. In what other profession would someone as accomplished as Persson say that?
From programmer's perspective, Minecraft is nothing special (and it's written in Java!). There is much better code out there. Quality of programming and success are not necessarily related.
That's probably true. Just to expand on this idea: Notch's priorities when he wrote Minecraft were quite different from most of our priorities as an employee, I would wager.
I dunno about you, but writing truly readable, intuitive, easy to maintain code is quite difficult. And you'll likely never get it right the first time. Refactoring for readability takes consultation from other human beings, and lots of time.
And when you're writing software for a business, it's really important to put in that time. You know what you're writing is going to last five or ten or more years and will be seen by dozens of people. It _needs_ to be good.
But for a guy working independently on a novel project? Fuck all that, I say. Just iterate as fast as you can towards the vision that you have while keeping some minimum standard of readability/maintainability. It doesn't need to be very good code, it just needs to be good enough that you can go back to it later without being completely confused.