71–80 of 102 posts
Great interview! I've always thought it was really neat that Walter posts here semi-frequently, and it's really fascinating to get even more of a peek into the mind of such a creative individual. Now I really need to get serious about starting a project in D so I can learn it properly...
I still have plenty of critics :-)
I take it as vaccination against World of Warcraft, etc.
Thanks, Walter
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If you're into that, I highly recommend you looking up Force Dynamics (a friend of mine) for high quality affordable driving simulators that are really close to actually driving the Real Thing (TM) https://www.force-dynamics.com/
It's sad that we still don't have an idea how to produce high g-forces in a simulator. The feeling of going with a car through a turn at 2g is incomparable to the simulators we have. Never mind F1 cars that can corner and brake at up to 5g.
Then we would solve this, and also provide more immersion for flight simulators.
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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…
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 aut…
Nice! But this trick doesn't work when a bad program is written in a HLL! I once speeded up a C++ program that took 3 minutes & was in the critical path for 40-50 engineers. It was badly written and the logic was spread all over the place. It was not fixable so I took the easy way out. I looked at its inputs+outputs, fed various smaller samples to figure out the IO logic and reimplemented it from scratch. The new program ran in 0.5 seconds. It wasn't a difficult problem but nobody wanted to touch the program because it was so badly written.
I think the moral is that bad programmers will misuse whatever features they have access to. The "dark side" is less that of the feature in question and more in the lack of early intervention and proper training! People need to be taught how to use power tools responsibly & judiciously. If you take away all the power tools for the fear of misuse, you will only see mediocre work. Or worse.
Walter here! AMA!
Is it stuck in the uncanny valley of being too similar to C, so its improvements weren't worth the cost in network effects?
Is it marketing -- like Go (a better C) but without the trillion dollar corporation, and Rust without the billion dollar foundation?
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Hi Walter, thanks for your time! Do you play many games nowadays? Which ones? What do you think is going to be the next big gaming breakthrough? Or the next big genre/theme? (E.g. for economics, it was F2P/IAP, never of which I'm a fan of. Also, city building + survival is really big right now.)
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttCXkfjnvvc
Some motion systems are simulating the 'motion' of the car, when they should be simulating the 'forces' on the driver.
For example sustained acceleration to the left because of heavy cornering should generate sustained tilt, so you feel heavier to the left.
The only issue is that the max acceleration that can be simulated is 1G. So a larger acceleration is either clipped or all accelerations are scaled.
My favourite concept is this one: https://www.yawvr.com/
Walter here! AMA!
So, I just want to say thanks for creating two big influences in my life. I hope you keep working on D, and for what it's worth, I do try to promote it as much as I can.
I do have one question: I contribute to the D Language Foundation through my Amazon purchases and would like know if those types of contributions are helping. And are you getting the support necessary to keep working on the compiler for a long time to come?
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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 aut…
> 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!" Nice! But this trick doesn't work when a bad program is written in a HLL! I on…
I would have agreed with you long ago. But decades of experience with it shows that:
1. Everyone agrees with that. And then they create a mess. They are generally unable to see the mess. One cannot learn without experiencing failure, and when one cannot see the failure, one cannot learn.
2. Some features are far more susceptible to this than others. Macros are pretty much at the top of that list. Other abominations are nutberger operator overloads, like overloading There are many things in D meant to block or discourage these kinds of choices. I regularly get pushback on them. All I can say is "I understand exactly where you're coming from, and why you believe I'm wrong. But you haven't been living with this for that long, and will just have to trust me."
3. These also come about from my discussions with managers of programming teams and the problems they have to deal with.
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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 aut…
> One is the use of macros in programming languages. Macros killed the Lisp. They never noticed.
Walter here! AMA!
Empire was one of my favorite games and really got me into strategy games. I even made a clone many years ago just to practice programming. And now D is my favorite language - it just feels natural to use. So, I just want to say thanks for creating two big influences in my life. I hope you keep working on D, and for what it's worth, I do try to promote it as much as I can. I do have one question: I contribute to the…