A talk with Walter Bright about Empire

You may not have played the game Empire, but if you've played any computer wargame, you've played something influenced by it. I'm very honored to have had the chance to discuss the development of Empire with Walter!

As mentioned in the article, he is a sometimes-reader of Hacker News, so if people have any follow-up questions, we may just get lucky and have him drop by to answer a few.

Thanks for such a great game. I remember playing Empire on my Amiga back in the late 80s, it didn't have any of the fancy 3D graphics of my other games but I still played Empire the most. I still play a clone of it frequently on my iPad.

Walter -- you've been in the game a long, long time. One of the first (the first?) commercial C++ compilers.

1. As a 20-something whose first (real) experience coding was Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts/take on "lessons we've forgotten" or things programmers nowadays think is something new, but is just an old thing being re-discovered/re-branded.

2. Also interested to hear your take on software bloat. I grew up on Windows XP, maybe it's the nostalgia, but I feel like both the responsiveness and usability of apps has declined, despite a x1000 fold increase in computer resources.

I can't help but get this sense of both awe and disgust that when I was a little kid, programs were written with so much more efficiency.

The peak of absurdism for me was when I sent both an SNES emulator and an SNES game ROM as a Discord chat message attachment to my wife the other night. The ENTIRE PROGRAM took up less space than a picture of a houseplant from my cellphone!

(Just 4MB, out of the 8MB limit for message attachments).

What're your thoughts here? Are we doomed?

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By the way, I It might not have a very big ecosystem, or huge backers, but as a LANGUAGE I can think of almost nothing I enjoy writing more.

(Though if there were an official LSP/tooling in-tree so that IDE intellisense worked when using UFCS syntax that would be life-changing. Currently, I restrict myself from using post-fix functions at all because they break Code-D's intellisense, so it's a waste of one of the best features =/ )

Maybe Stefan Koch's new "reflect" thing that spits out the JSON-looking AST can be useful for this? I'm not super knowledgeable though.

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm not sure about lessons forgotten, but there are definitely lessons never learned. One is the use of macros in programming languages. Macros are one of those great ideas that seem almost miraculous. They provide immense power to the programmer.

Unfortunately, the dahk side of macros inevitably consumes the user. The macros inevitably become so confusing, pervasive and complex that the author winds up inventing his own undocumented mess of a language, unusable for anyone else.

For example (one of my favorite anecdotes!) back in the 90s a friend of mine worked at Microsoft. A manager showed him a program written in assembler that needed a bug fixed. Several programmers had been assigned to it one after the other, and they all failed.

It seems the original implementer, who had since left the company, had invented his own macro language using MASM, Microsoft's macro assembler. Nobody could figure it out.

My friend said "I can fix that" and fixed the bug and checked it in in two hours. The manager, astonished, asked him how he figured it out. He said "I didn't figure it out. I disassembled the object code using Walter's disassembler that turns it into assembler source code, found the bug, fixed it, and checked in the new asm source code!"

The itch to write a better language & compiler than anyone else is more compelling!

But I am attracted to full motion simulators that would, say, enable me to drive an F1 car without risk or much investment.