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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?

#51

Post by danielvaughn »

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.

Certain kinds of comparisons can be unhelpful. Others can be illuminating, often instilling a sense of gratitude and humility.

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

#52

Post by sanderjd »

rjbwork wrote: post #8
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…

Yup. When I get frustrated I just take a deep breath and then remember how relatively easy and well compensated this career is compared to just about anything else - for me, anyway.

I think this hints at another truth though: If you switch your metric to up-weight happiness and down-weight material rewards, it moves down the rankings IMO.

Believe it or not, I know some people who essentially never get frustrated by their work, while making a decent wage. In some of these cases, they also don't have the "is what I'm doing useless or even actively harmful" ennui that is prevalent in the software industry.

I try to remind myself that some of my pay is compensation is for frequent frustration.

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

#53

Post by atahanacar »

armada651 wrote: post #5

> How to workaround too little RAM problem? Let’s load pixel graphics if player is far away and call it mip mapping Hold up, mip mapping is not a way to save RAM in fact it consumes more RAM because not only do you need to have the full-size texture in RAM you also need to keep smaller copies in RAM. What it does save on is memory bandwidth , because you don't need to sample from the full-size texture for objects tha…

>Hold up, mip mapping is not a way to save RAM in fact it consumes more RAM because not only do you need to have the full-size texture in RAM you also need to keep smaller copies in RAM.

While that's how it's mostly used today, mipmapping refers to storing scaled-down versions of the same texture along with the original texture. You don't have to load all of them to RAM (or VRAM). You can simply store the mipmaps on a hard drive, and only load the required mip levels to the GPU, thus saving VRAM. This way, you are using mipmaps as texture LODs. Think about satellite images of Google Maps.

>What it does save on is memory bandwidth, because you don't need to sample from the full-size texture

Not exactly. It does save memory bandwidth, because you're sampling less texels and reducing cache misses, not because you're sampling from a smaller texture. You're simply not downscaling the texture on the fly, instead using precalculated downscaled pixel values.

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

#54

Post by SeanAnderson »

bombcar wrote: post #46
SeanAnderson wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh cool, I didn't realize Factorio had such an extensive dev blog. I see it goes back over a decade! It'll be a treat to read through this :)

And ugh, I can believe it with DF. I'm trying to deliver something with similar quality graphics and naively thought that setting the bar so low would make that aspect of the project "free" :)... but it's about the journey not the destination and it is so rewarding making all the little micro-improvements over time. So, I'll stick with it and hope to get quicker as I gain more experience.

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

#55

Post by IshKebab »

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…

They needed to make a profit.

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

#56

Post by GuB-42 »

jon_adler wrote: post #25
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.

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.

Or maybe he knew, but pretended that he didn't. Lines are a waste of time, and serve little purpose besides punishment. Writing code is a much better use of that time.

If I was a teacher, I think that's how I would react. The next punishment would be handwritten though, or something else, you only get one shot with that trick.

I admit that in the early 80s, most teachers were not very savvy with computers, so it is possible that he really believed your brother typed it all. But also keep in mind that teachers are pretty good at smelling bullshit, and it is pretty obvious that when pupils do things in an unusual way, it is not to make it harder on themselves, so he probably knew that there was some trick and just let it pass. I mean, these are just lines, nothing worth persecuting clever kids for.

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

#57

Post by twiceaday »

jon_adler wrote: post #25
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.

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.

Write one line. Copy and paste it to make two lines. Copy and paste _those_ to get four lines, etc.

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

#58

Post by tomaszs »

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…

The article is available for free. Just use the link at the top. It's not paywalled

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

#59

Post by tomaszs »

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

So you're using a page that stole my article. Thank you

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

#60

Post by lambdasquirrel »

kazinator wrote: post #39
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming isn't hard . It isn't easy either, but it isn't hard . I think the thing about programming is that so much of the "old" world misunderstood how it was hard. There is a lot more creative process stuff involved with programming, and not nearly as much that is codified, that you need to study, as in other fields like physics. And so, it gives people wide leeway to footgun themselves. Just as much, going the…

Programming isn't hard if you exclude debugging as being a different activity.

I think it elevates it to the level of other STEM fields, but I wouldn't put it over wrapping your head around Lagrangians or figuring out where the noise in your experiment is coming from.

What'd I'd say though is that managing the process of shipping software isn't easy. e.g. building AWS was probably not easy. But then again, building a tokamak or a stellarator is not easy either.

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