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Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

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Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#111

Post by jebblue »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #86
melling wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beats me. I guess someday when you're an old man, right before you close your eyes for the last time, you can imagine all that cool code that you wrote, and say what a great life you had. You were a hacker. Steve, Larry, Notch, and the Instagram guys can know what they did made a difference. The world is a different place because they lived. They connected the important dots and hacked life...

> I guess someday when you're an old man, right before you close your eyes for the last time, you can imagine all that cool code that you wrote, and say what a great life you had. You were a hacker. I'm also a researcher, and I like to think that the ideas I discover will outlast me and will make a difference. Your implication is that those who think of software as a 'product' to be sold are making a difference, and…

>> I just wish there was a place for those of us who appreciate the craft to hang out. Hacker News, for a long time, was that place for me.

I still don't get what you're talking about, you like to look at and admire code like it's art? Can you give an example of code that gives you satisfaction to just look at it regardless what it does?

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#112

Post by Morgawr »

coldtea wrote: post #65
ddevault wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits. He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. I say this as someone who has spent a c…

> He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. So, he's a pragmatic programmer that gets shit done -- to the point of being able to design…

Not disagreeing with you but as far as I know most (all?) of the CPU in 0x10c was designed by Romero

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#113

Post by thedufer »

Mithaldu wrote: post #109
DigitalJack wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not attacking a person to ask them to back up their qualifications to judge.

How many movies or tv shows have you made? Have you ever told someone that a tv show was bad? I bet the answers are zero and plenty, respectively. The kind of argument you're making is a very big fallacy.

That's not really a rational analogy. That would be analogous if we were discussing someone consuming minecraft (i.e. playing it), not someone working on it.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#114

Post by corresation »

romaniv wrote: post #98
willismichael wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - nobody is arguing that throwing together sloppy code is always a good thing. Mostly I'm just saying that some amount of sloppy code isn't necessary a bad thing. Like you say, the amount of sloppy code that you can get away with depends on what you are doing. There are vast discussions about this both online and in books, referring to "sloppy code" as "technical debt". Just like monetary debt, sometimes it is…

Software engineers have an unfortunate tendency to accumulate technical debt and then run away from paying it. I've seen this way, way more often and with far worse overall cost than any kind of perfectionism. The dichotomy between quality and speed of development is often an illusion anyway.

I've seen this way, way more often and with far worse overall cost than any kind of perfectionism.

I'm not intending to be some sort of advocate of purportedly bad code, but I find the quoted section to be an interesting statement because, if true (and it likely is true), it simply reinforces the notion that ugly, pragmatic projects endure and succeed: You've seen "way, way more" of that sort because they deliver actual value and end up providing an actual solution for the world, while perfectionists are still busy arguing over trivia.

This is the survivorship bias at play. Organizations accumulate "technical debt" because the only code that gives that any assets has such realistic downsides.

And while you account for the cost, you say absolutely nothing about the benefit/"earnings", which is a typical analysis of people who work on other people's code.

I have created a lot of terrible code in my career, almost always doing greenfield development.

This was code that was spun out under incredible conditions, where we had no idea what our product was going to be, the parameters of the data or the conditions that it would be used in, etc. We had changing dev environments and assumptions, libraries getting tossed and new ones added, etc.

And those projects built companies. And it was always novel hearing someone ranting about technical debt years later, when they were hired in a position and on a team and in a company that only continued to exist because of that solution. Debt indeed.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#115

Post by Morgawr »

melling wrote: post #61
ddevault wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits. He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. I say this as someone who has spent a c…

What kind of a person even idolizes someone for writing great code? Steve Jobs couldn't code at all. Facebook was written in PHP. GroupOn started on WordPress. According to this Slashdot article, Sergey and Larry aren't great programmers. http://tech-beta.slashdot.org/story/13/11/01/1324209/larry-p... The Instagram founders didn't have a programming background: http://thenextweb.com/2012/04/10/instagrams-ceo-had-no-f…

Personally I couldn't care less about a bunch of ceos or company managers, as a programmer I look up to people like dennis ritchie, linus torvalds, bjarne stroustrup, rob pike, brian kernighan.. etc etc

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#116

Post by BlackDeath3 »

ddevault wrote: post #29
kleiba wrote: post #19

Now, I haven't seen one line of Notch's code. I have no idea if it's well structured or spaghetti. I would make an educated guess and say that there's a lot of the basics in this project that have been ported over from the Minecraft or 0x10c code. This last point is rather unlikely I think. I spent more than one or two weeks worth of time watching the various screencasts you can find on twitch.tv of Notch coding (I f…

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits. He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. I say this as someone who has spent a c…

>He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed.

In the interest of my own self-improvement, could you elaborate a bit on this?

EDIT: I see that you've already talked about this a little bit, but if you'd like to elaborate further I'd be OK with that.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#117

Post by [deleted] »

corresation wrote: post #83
ddevault wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also spent time examining Notch's coding habits. He is a terrible, terrible coder. Minecraft was (and still is) an unoptimized, poorly designed piece of crap when he handed it off to the rest of Mojang. The DCPU-16 he designed had many flaws and his assembler for it threw out assembly convention. He makes very basic mistakes very frequently and his core designs are flawed. I say this as someone who has spent a c…

Notch is a very bad programmer I despise this sort of single-dimension haughty evaluation of programming "goodness": It is garbage, and is the dismissive grenades that a particular type of maintenance programmer tosses to feel better about themselves as they try to feed the family with sloppy seconds. I single out maintenance programmers because there is a stark difference between creating something out of nothing, a…

[deleted]

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#118

Post by krapp »

aidenn0 wrote: post #55
krapp wrote: post #24

>Don't build an engine that you will someday build a game on top of, because you will never get past step one. I have several still-unfinished Game Maker apps which more or less died because I got so bogged down on the "engine". So yeah.

In this case, I see an analogy with the whole "Do it manually with a few customers" advice for startups that pops up from time-to-time. You write the damn code from scratch and see what gameplay is interesting, then you can write tools within that domain.

Now that html5 is a thing that would definitely be doable.

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#119

Post by tehwebguy »

DigitalJack wrote: post #85
tehwebguy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not an ad hominem attack I don't think just saying that makes it true

It's not attacking a person to ask them to back up their qualifications to judge.

Asking for qualifications isn't the same as asking for evidence

Re: Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly

#120

Post by BlackDeath3 »

exDM69 wrote: post #50
habith wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found NeHe's tutorials to be easy to follow especially since code that's ready to compile is provided at the end of each lesson: http://nehe.gamedev.net/ Most of them focus on OpenGL for windows. I just searched and found this WebGL tutorial which says it's based on NeHe's so it's hopefully good: http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=28 Disclaimer: I'm not a game developer and I barely dabble in the 3D world, so take my…

Stay away from NeHe tutorials, they are badly written and really old. Pretty much everything they cover is deprecated and done in otherwise old fashioned ways. This is a big problem with OpenGL tutorials in general, a lot of them cover old stuff that shouldn't be used any more. The entire OpenGL fixed function pipeline is deprecated, replaced by programmable shader pipeline. It's a lot more work to get simple stuff d…

If all you're looking to do is simple stuff (like get a rectangle on the screen), shaders are not required, correct?
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