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What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

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Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#41

Post by frfl »

zeppelin101 wrote: post #35
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #28

Can I say how much I hate Medium these days? Remember when it didn't suck and was doing such a good job of not sucking that all sorts of very serious people created Medium accounts to start blogging? What the hell happened, Medium? I started reading this story, got about halfway down, and the story stopped and I got this big centered H2 reading "Create an account to read the full story." Fine, I want to read the rest…

This is why you should get various browser extensions that cut through this nonsense.

There's not much good content on medium anyway. Most of it is shallow and lacks any real subsistence. The rare useful post is out numbered 10-to-1 or even 100-to-1 or more by shallow blog spam and other noise.

I can only imagine substack will end up the same in a few years time. These platforms get all hyped up and end up drowned in spam and low quality stuff when they go mainstream.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#42

Post by schoenobates »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #28

Can I say how much I hate Medium these days? Remember when it didn't suck and was doing such a good job of not sucking that all sorts of very serious people created Medium accounts to start blogging? What the hell happened, Medium? I started reading this story, got about halfway down, and the story stopped and I got this big centered H2 reading "Create an account to read the full story." Fine, I want to read the rest…

I now use archive.ph to read these types of article now. Medium as a platform is awful and the constant nag to signup just puts me off so much.

https://archive.ph/fh12P

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#44

Post by CobrastanJorji »

schoenobates wrote: post #42
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #28

Can I say how much I hate Medium these days? Remember when it didn't suck and was doing such a good job of not sucking that all sorts of very serious people created Medium accounts to start blogging? What the hell happened, Medium? I started reading this story, got about halfway down, and the story stopped and I got this big centered H2 reading "Create an account to read the full story." Fine, I want to read the rest…

I now use archive.ph to read these types of article now. Medium as a platform is awful and the constant nag to signup just puts me off so much. https://archive.ph/fh12P

Ooo, nice, thanks!

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#45

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

echelon_musk wrote: post #21
WJW wrote: post #15

Doing anything repetitive with a large amount of data by virtue of knowing about for-loops. There have been so many times where people wanted something done to a million users/objects/whatever and were surprised that I got back in 5 minutes. One of them even muttered the words "I thought that would take you all day", when actually 3 of the 5 minutes were spent getting a cup of coffee.

I had a colleague at a previous workplace who had studied game design at university unaware of what a for loop was when I showed him. It boggled my mind!

Sadly, I've interviewed enough people that this doesn't surprise me in the least.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#46

Post by bombcar »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #40
ben_w wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems surprising, and I've been a game dev before I switched to mobile. How large is a "large" tilemap? And what is it that makes them particularly hard in the AAA space?

My grid right now is 144x144, so about 20,000 tiles. Things were working OK in iOS Safari when just using colors to draw the tiles, but the browser started crashing when I tried upgrading to image sprites. Turns out the trick is to not submit each individual tile to the GPU. You have to roll them up into larger, chunked meshes and submit those meshes to lessen the impact. I'm sure this is game dev 101, but I've never…

People assume that all the difficult video stuff is 3D and that 2D is "solved" but it's actually quite an issue to do it well and fast.

The Factorio dev blog has some of the issues encountered, and rendering speed for Dwarf Fortress in ASCII mode has been an issue in the past.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#47

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

kazinator wrote: post #30

> 1981 A first 3D game called Tempest is published Battlezone is actual 3D, and 1980. I'm not saying that is first, either, just that 1980 > How to workaround too little RAM problem? Let’s load pixel graphics if player is far away and call it mip mapping: MIP mapping is not primarily a RAM problem solving device. It's a way of precomputing the shrinking of texture images for when they appear in the distance, so that…

Tempest is indeed a terrible example:

- it's a static perspective view, less complex than sprite based 2D

- it's implemented on a vector screen, where the cathode ray gun is drawing the lines instead of the software, not a bitmapped one

- almost everything can be precalculated and only vertex locations need be stored

Of course it's still a creative game, but not very hard to implement.

It should be noted that Battlezone wasn't actual 3D since everything happened on a fixed plane, but it had dynamic rotating shapes and the like so much more advanced.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#48

Post by thekiptxt »

lelandfe wrote: post #37
jon_adler wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother was given lines to write as a punishment in the early 80s. He wrote a for loop in basic and printed the result. The teacher didn’t know any better and was happy to accept the printout. Assuming he’d typed it all from scratch.

Similarly, I was tasked with counting every file in a folder and its subdirectories as a punishment at a job on campus as an undergrad. I plonked out a Bash oneliner in a couple minutes and gave the result. My disgruntled superior had me do it again by hand.

Ah, you had the knowledge to solve the problem using bash, but had not the wisdom to sit on the answer and surf the web until a plausible amount of time had passed :)

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#49

Post by bombcar »

ryandrake wrote: post #19
kvdveer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does storing more copies of the same texture save ram? Of course one can drop the higher resolution textures, but AFAIK that technique came long after mipmapping, as it requires high cpu-to-gpu bandwidth, which wasn't there in the earlier days.

Right. Mipmapping is different than simply using lower levels of detail textures. Mipmapping is when you store the full level of detail plus progressively lower levels of detail (always adding up to 33% more data) so that the correct LOD texel can be looked up depending on the required rendering detail. You're using more memory for higher quality (and sometimes faster) rendering.

What is it when you have the detail texture loaded in such a way that you can say "get every second byte (or whatever)" to get the half size, and so on?

IIRC some CPUs were good at that kind of memory access, but most were not.

Re: What's something difficult programmers make look easy?

#50

Post by kayodelycaon »

waynesonfire wrote: post #14
danielvaughn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I feel fortunate that I didn't start out in tech - I didn't become a programmer until I was 30. I'd been working since I was 15 or so, so I'd had about 15 years of experience in various industries. I think a lot of devs who go into comp-sci and land into tech right after college have very little understanding of how hard life can be outside of tech. This isn't an easy industry, but goddamn it's so much better t…

> it's so much better than the vast majority of other options out there. The journey towards enlightenment or personal growth is highly individualized and subjective, making comparisons with others is not only unhelpful but also irrelevant.

Better in terms of effort to money.
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