Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 168 posts

Re: Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

#141

Post by amagumori »

nemothekid wrote: post #128
amagumori wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

game devs like notch have made a conscious and canny decision to value actually making something over code quality. also, notch didn't build minecraft expecting it to be a runaway success. see, you are a programmer - you make code. notch is a game developer. he USES code to make THINGS. the things matter, not the code. the game developer ethic is "nothing matters but getting the game running." it's not that notch is…

game devs like notch have made a conscious and canny decision to value actually making something over code quality. These aren't mutually exclusive. When Carmack, Sweeney et al. built Quake/Unreal, they made something that was both fun and had incredible code quality. Derivatives of the Quake & Unreal engines run today and have been for the last 20 years. I'm doubtful that any code written by Notch for Minecraft will…

uhh...when you mention NASA engineers and Google "actually making something" while adhering to strict code quality you seem to overlook the fact that NASA and Google are organizations with thousands of developers and notch is ONE GUY.

the point is that game development is inherently a big job and you have to make massive tradeoffs if you want to get something working in a reasonable amount of time by yourself. of course if you have thousands of people to throw at the problem you can go nuts and adhere to the highest of quality standards.

but i agree that notch isn't a mythical programmer or "10x engineer".

Re: Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

#142

Post by kristianp »

scrapcode wrote: post #104
csours wrote: post #102

Putting aside all the ad-hominem and everything-is-terrible, I think I learned a lot from following the references Tef makes in this talk. Some references (sorry for the formatting, if this becomes a thing I'll do the wiki and the logo): Slides: https://github.com/tef/emfcamp2012/raw/master/programming_is... Blub Paradox: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlubParadox Perl and 9/11: http://www.…

TL;DR: this, and this guy really does not like Jeff Atwood.

He doesn't like PG or Joel Spolsky either!

Re: Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

#143

Post by nemothekid »

amagumori wrote: post #141
nemothekid wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

game devs like notch have made a conscious and canny decision to value actually making something over code quality. These aren't mutually exclusive. When Carmack, Sweeney et al. built Quake/Unreal, they made something that was both fun and had incredible code quality. Derivatives of the Quake & Unreal engines run today and have been for the last 20 years. I'm doubtful that any code written by Notch for Minecraft will…

uhh...when you mention NASA engineers and Google "actually making something" while adhering to strict code quality you seem to overlook the fact that NASA and Google are organizations with thousands of developers and notch is ONE GUY. the point is that game development is inherently a big job and you have to make massive tradeoffs if you want to get something working in a reasonable amount of time by yourself . of co…

uhh...when you mention NASA engineers and Google "actually making something" while adhering to strict code quality you seem to overlook the fact that NASA and Google are organizations with thousands of developers and notch is ONE GUY.

And Tim Sweeney did a lot of development on Unreal 4 on his own[1]. The trade offs of structure & abandon can work at many scales, you don't have to be Google to do it. Likewise Redis[2] has largely been the work of a single developer, and isn't reckless.

Now while Minecraft is a toy and Notch likely didn't start out with the thought to develop it into a business, that doesn't mean the value of its code is worthless. Yes the tradeoffs are there, but we shouldn't get carried away and start to believe you can only write "good" code if you have a thousand engineers.

[1]http://www.tgdaily.com/business-and-law-features/36436-tim-s... [2]https://github.com/antirez/redis/graphs/contributors

Re: Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

#144

Post by Guthur »

sheepmullet wrote: post #98
encoderer wrote: post #7

He bashes the "myth of the 10x" engineer. Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example. Anybody who has watched N0tch code on Twitch knows that there are certainly people who are far more productive coders than the average engineer. I have no idea if he's…

"Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example." It takes 6-8 years of intense training to become a doctor. This is after already doing well in college and passing a tough skills/general intelligence test. The bottom 70%+ who want to become doctors are simp…

And also to become a Consultant you will be expected to work the most unsocial, anti work life balance schedule ever devised.

Frankly software engineer is fluffy happy world of love and inclusion compared to medicine; a more masochistic profession you will not find.

My experience is second hand through my wife's participation in medicine as a hospital doctor.

N.B. General Practitioners seem to have a far more acceptable work life balance.

Re: Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

#145

Post by Ygg2 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #87
Ygg2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Hicks video about marketing was unbelievably funny, while pretty much say exactly that to marketing people for ten solid minutes. I get there is probably some deeper reason behind your views. But I respectfully disagree.

Is this what you've got in mind? http://fixyt.com/watch?v=3_VWXMFGsTo

Yeah. That's what I had in mind :D

Re: Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

#146

Post by pawelkomarnicki »

I find the whole idea of using "writing speed" as the factor describing how good is a programmer, plainly: stupid. Honestly, you can be a mindless person making weird, overblown constructs all day, and then you can be a smart developer that thinks before writing few characters and solving the same problem. I would rather consider efficiency as the factor: process and output efficiency.

Process efficiency is how organised is the process of the development — a.k.a. getting things done. If somebody keeps shipping stuff, they are process efficient. Even if it's the smallest thing ever, just keeping the flow going.

Then there's the output efficiency — how efficient is the thing that was shipped. Is the code high quality? Is the algorithm performing well in the problem's domain? Is the code running "fast"?

I personally think that the best developers optimise their work on these two fields: they keep delivering great output code most of the time. Because what is better: lots of bad code in short time, or good code taking more time?

Re: Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

#147

Post by stan_rogers »

cremno wrote: post #33
okasaki wrote: post #12

page 10 of the slides says: > kill yourself now That's totally inappropriate no matter how funny you think you are.

Just the slides do. Maybe he later thought the same and then omitted or replaced that suggestion in his talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyL9EC0S0c&t=393

More than that, it's just the slide notes (things that people other than the presenter don't usually see, even when the slides are published) that say it. Those are ordinarily shorthand speaking notes; memory aids for an extemporaneous talk to make sure that you include all of the points that you had intended to include. It could as easily have been written as "you are beyond help" or some such, but the idea is to convey the maximum information to the speaker with the fewest number of words.

Re: Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

#148

Post by detaro »

sz4kerto wrote: post #86
MichaelGG wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear there's a 10x difference in, say, error rates between the best and worst doctors. In fact, I'm almost definitely sure that's a lower bound, given my experiences with doctors in third world countries. Barbaric, some of them still are. Depending how bad the worse doctors are, 10x from "average" might be reasonable. In software development, I think that 10x number is also a lower bound if…

10x difference between error rates? No, this is not the case. Well, it might be in some special situations, like a scammer and a specialist, but you'll wont find that in the case of GPs, for example. Obviously you should only compare doctors on the same field (N0tch would be quite unproductive if he suddenly had to work with COBOL, for example), and between those the difference is measured in percentages, not 1000 pe…

I would be interested in the source and how they defined the error rate. (Although I'm not sure error rates are the best way to define a doctors "productivity")

Re: Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

#149

Post by mjevans »

bayesianhorse wrote: post #118
reedlaw wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we all use code to make things. However, not caring about the code can spell disaster for the thing we're making. In the case of Minecraft it appears the code is good enough but I wonder how many more features would exist if it wasn't for the poor design.

So far, it hasn't lead to disaster in case of Minecraft...

Minecraft is fun. However I'd clearly state that Minecraft, especially the early multi-player stuff that Notch worked on, /was/ a disaster.

Only now, three numbering schemes later (alpha, beta, release), in release version 1.8, does the core game actually have features such as abstracting implementation IDs from object types (EG: now there is minecraft:glass to resolve instead of remembering decimal value 20. Though mods for r1.8 are only just beginning, so that scoping might not yet exist.)

Re: Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

#150

Post by M8 »

binarytrees wrote: post #117

Who cares if you're 10x, we'll all be 10x dead at some point. In 50-100 years I doubt most of your 10x work will still be around. Might as well go enjoy some life before it ends.

GitHub and BitBucket are going to delete sources after a period of time? Could you please point me to that licence agreement paragraph? Are museums going to throw away paintings in 50-100 years as well?
Post reply on HN