7 ms·

There is no doubting Casey's chops when he talks about performance, but as someone who has spent many hours watching (and enjoying!) his videos, as he stares pu

by thom 4y ago

There is no doubting Casey's chops when he talks about performance, but as someone who has spent many hours watching (and enjoying!) his videos, as he stares puzzled at compiler errors, scrolls up and down endlessly at code he no longer remembers writing, and then - when it finally does compile - immediately has to dig into the debugger to work out something else that's gone wrong, I suspect the real answer to programmer happiness is somewhere in the middle.

krapp 4y ago
If you're talking about Handmade Hero, the real answer to programmer happiness is not using a language you despise and refusing to leverage the features of, not refusing to use libraries in that language or frameworks, not re-implementing everything from first principles, and to actually have your game designed first (not designing while you code.)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Casey is a bad example of a game designer and he'll be the first to admit it. However, it is worth noting that Jonathan Blow very much does design while he codes and recommends the practice. He also generally abstains from library dependencies and implements a lot of thing himself. Of course, part of the point of Handmade Hero is to show that you can totally reimplement everything from first principles. Libraries are not magical black boxes, they're code written by human beings like you or me, and you can understand what they're doing. For instance, he wrote his own PNG decoder[0] live on stream, with hardly any prior knowledge of the spec, even though I'm confident that under normal circumstances he'd just use stb_image. I'm sure he did this just to show how you'd go about doing that sort of thing. [0] He only implemented the parts necessary to load a non-progressive 24bit color image, but that still involved writing his own DEFLATE implementation.
  - bbatha 4y ago
    Is Blow even a good example to look at? He's released 2 games in 18 years which definitely had phenomenal game play but are not technically complex even for the the time.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      Yes, he is a good example. His games are as highly regarded as they are because he takes the time to really work through everything about them and ensure they're the product he wants. If you watch his streams you'll see that he is constantly experimenting with things, both gameplay-wise and in the engine... and now in his own compiler for his own programming language. Jon is not making the by-the-numbers annual entry in the Call of FIFA series here. But also, as a nit pick, Jon isn't just programming all the time, he's running a business and he is very involved in the indie game community and a founding member of indie fund. And when he is programming it isn't always for his own games. Here is a link to the credits page for him at MobyGames: https://www.mobygames.com/person/188969/jonathan-blow/credits/ https://www.mobygames.com/person/188969/jonathan-blow/credit... Where in addition to nebulous "Special Thanks" credits, you will note programming and QA credits on several non-Thekla games.
      - bbatha 4y ago
        Look I'm a huge fan of his games! And I really can't understate how influential his game design nor the work he does for the indie community. However, I think a lot of folks tend to assume his software engineering skills are great because his game design is excellent. I don't think that's an earned position. Releasing 2 games in 18 years that are not pushing the technical envelope does not scream software engineering expertise. You say he has more credits but only one of those is programming since Braid. On the other hand, on a software engineering level those paint by numbers Modern Warfare and FIFA games are both more technically impressive and are designed for fast iteration. Moreover he's pushing a particular paradigm and view point that is in many ways the opposite of clean code. He pushes for still doing very low level design with minimal abstractions. But even at the time Braid could have been written in python SDL wrappers and probably had similar performance, and the witness could have used unity. If clean code is about maintenance and time to market, the Blow paradigm hasn't proven that its needed or fixes the holes in clean code. This is not to say clean code is perfect just that Blow hasn't cracked the nut either and I don't know why people act like he is the final word, or honestly even a respected voice, in game software engineering. On the other hand, if Blow wanted to talk about managing indie studios or game design my ears would prick up instantly.
- andai 4y ago
  Doing things without libraries (except the stuff built into Windows XP?) is the whole point of the project.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    But the results of living in a contrived environment is that there are no guarantees that at the end you will understand 'normal' environments better or just be over-trained on your fictitious one.
  - krapp 4y ago
    The problem is people get hooked into Casey's misanthropic philosophies and take his rants as gospel, and wind up believing Handmade Hero represents the way game development should be done, that libraries and frameworks can't be trusted, that C++ shouldn't be used at all, and you should implement as much from scratch as possible, when none of that is true.
    - andai 4y ago
      refterm
      - krapp 4y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745507
- TylerGlaiel 4y ago
  > and to actually have your game designed first (not designing while you code.) tell me you've never made a game without telling me you've never made a game
  - jesse__ 4y ago
    hahahaahahaha, that's accurate af
rstefanic 4y ago
When working with a larger code base, there will always be parts that you don't remember writing and you'll inevitably have to read the code to understand it. That's just part of the job/task, regardless of the style it's written in.
- hinkley 4y ago
  In shared code particularly with a culture of refactoring, there's no guarantee that the function call you see is doing what you remember it doing a year ago. When I was coming up I got gifted a bunch of modules at several jobs because the original writer couldn't be arsed to keep up with the many incremental changes I'd been making. They had a mentality that code was meant to be memorized instead of explored, and I was just beginning to understand code exploration from a writer's perspective. So they were both on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of me. Fuck it, if you want it so much, kid, it's yours now. Good luck.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    Why were you making incremental changes?
    - hinkley 4y ago
      "Make the change easy, then make the easy change" hadn't even been coined as a phrase yet when I discovered the utility of that behavior. When I read 'Refactoring (Fowler)' it was more like psychotherapy than a roadmap to better software. "So that's why I am like this." When we get unstuck on a problem it's usually due to finding a new perspective. Sometimes those come as epiphanies, but while miracles do happen, planning on them leads to disappointment. Sometimes you just have to do the work. Finding new perspectives 'the hard way' involves looking at the problem from different angles, and if explaining it to someone else doesn't work, then often enough just organizing a block of code will help you stumble on that new perspective. And if that also fails, at least the code is in better shape now. Not long after I figured out how to articulate that, my writer friend figured out the same thing about creative writing, so I took it as a sign I was on the right track. I do know that the first time I was doing that, it was for performance reasons. I was on a project that was so slow you could see the pixels painting. My first month on that project I was doing optimizations by saying "1 Mississippi" out loud. The second month I used a timer app. I was three months in before I even needed to print(end - start).
throw938383 4y ago
> There is no doubting Casey's chops when he talks about performance, Remember that everyone has their blind spots! I follow Casey on twitter, and a couple years ago there was a weird thread where he had hung his browser for 4-5 seconds by running some JS to assign CSS rules to ~50K div elements. And Casey was a million percent confident that the hang was due to JS being slow, and had nothing to do with CSS or DOM rendering.
wellanyway 4y ago
Because enterprise Java programmers never stare puzzled at anything.

by thom 4y ago

krapp 4y ago

If you're talking about Handmade Hero, the real answer to programmer happiness is not using a language you despise and refusing to leverage the features of, not refusing to use libraries in that language or frameworks, not re-implementing everything from first principles, and to actually have your game designed first (not designing while you code.)

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Casey is a bad example of a game designer and he'll be the first to admit it. However, it is worth noting that Jonathan Blow very much does design while he codes and recommends the practice. He also generally abstains from library dependencies and implements a lot of thing himself. Of course, part of the point of Handmade Hero is to show that you can totally reimplement everything from first principles. Libraries are not magical black boxes, they're code written by human beings like you or me, and you can understand what they're doing. For instance, he wrote his own PNG decoder[0] live on stream, with hardly any prior knowledge of the spec, even though I'm confident that under normal circumstances he'd just use stb_image. I'm sure he did this just to show how you'd go about doing that sort of thing. [0] He only implemented the parts necessary to load a non-progressive 24bit color image, but that still involved writing his own DEFLATE implementation.
- bbatha 4y ago
  Is Blow even a good example to look at? He's released 2 games in 18 years which definitely had phenomenal game play but are not technically complex even for the the time.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Yes, he is a good example. His games are as highly regarded as they are because he takes the time to really work through everything about them and ensure they're the product he wants. If you watch his streams you'll see that he is constantly experimenting with things, both gameplay-wise and in the engine... and now in his own compiler for his own programming language. Jon is not making the by-the-numbers annual entry in the Call of FIFA series here. But also, as a nit pick, Jon isn't just programming all the time, he's running a business and he is very involved in the indie game community and a founding member of indie fund. And when he is programming it isn't always for his own games. Here is a link to the credits page for him at MobyGames: https://www.mobygames.com/person/188969/jonathan-blow/credits/ https://www.mobygames.com/person/188969/jonathan-blow/credit... Where in addition to nebulous "Special Thanks" credits, you will note programming and QA credits on several non-Thekla games.
    - bbatha 4y ago
      Look I'm a huge fan of his games! And I really can't understate how influential his game design nor the work he does for the indie community. However, I think a lot of folks tend to assume his software engineering skills are great because his game design is excellent. I don't think that's an earned position. Releasing 2 games in 18 years that are not pushing the technical envelope does not scream software engineering expertise. You say he has more credits but only one of those is programming since Braid. On the other hand, on a software engineering level those paint by numbers Modern Warfare and FIFA games are both more technically impressive and are designed for fast iteration. Moreover he's pushing a particular paradigm and view point that is in many ways the opposite of clean code. He pushes for still doing very low level design with minimal abstractions. But even at the time Braid could have been written in python SDL wrappers and probably had similar performance, and the witness could have used unity. If clean code is about maintenance and time to market, the Blow paradigm hasn't proven that its needed or fixes the holes in clean code. This is not to say clean code is perfect just that Blow hasn't cracked the nut either and I don't know why people act like he is the final word, or honestly even a respected voice, in game software engineering. On the other hand, if Blow wanted to talk about managing indie studios or game design my ears would prick up instantly.
andai 4y ago
Doing things without libraries (except the stuff built into Windows XP?) is the whole point of the project.
- hinkley 4y ago
  But the results of living in a contrived environment is that there are no guarantees that at the end you will understand 'normal' environments better or just be over-trained on your fictitious one.
- krapp 4y ago
  The problem is people get hooked into Casey's misanthropic philosophies and take his rants as gospel, and wind up believing Handmade Hero represents the way game development should be done, that libraries and frameworks can't be trusted, that C++ shouldn't be used at all, and you should implement as much from scratch as possible, when none of that is true.
  - andai 4y ago
    refterm
    - krapp 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28745507
TylerGlaiel 4y ago
> and to actually have your game designed first (not designing while you code.) tell me you've never made a game without telling me you've never made a game
- jesse__ 4y ago
  hahahaahahaha, that's accurate af

rstefanic 4y ago

When working with a larger code base, there will always be parts that you don't remember writing and you'll inevitably have to read the code to understand it. That's just part of the job/task, regardless of the style it's written in.

hinkley 4y ago
In shared code particularly with a culture of refactoring, there's no guarantee that the function call you see is doing what you remember it doing a year ago. When I was coming up I got gifted a bunch of modules at several jobs because the original writer couldn't be arsed to keep up with the many incremental changes I'd been making. They had a mentality that code was meant to be memorized instead of explored, and I was just beginning to understand code exploration from a writer's perspective. So they were both on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of me. Fuck it, if you want it so much, kid, it's yours now. Good luck.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Why were you making incremental changes?
  - hinkley 4y ago
    "Make the change easy, then make the easy change" hadn't even been coined as a phrase yet when I discovered the utility of that behavior. When I read 'Refactoring (Fowler)' it was more like psychotherapy than a roadmap to better software. "So that's why I am like this." When we get unstuck on a problem it's usually due to finding a new perspective. Sometimes those come as epiphanies, but while miracles do happen, planning on them leads to disappointment. Sometimes you just have to do the work. Finding new perspectives 'the hard way' involves looking at the problem from different angles, and if explaining it to someone else doesn't work, then often enough just organizing a block of code will help you stumble on that new perspective. And if that also fails, at least the code is in better shape now. Not long after I figured out how to articulate that, my writer friend figured out the same thing about creative writing, so I took it as a sign I was on the right track. I do know that the first time I was doing that, it was for performance reasons. I was on a project that was so slow you could see the pixels painting. My first month on that project I was doing optimizations by saying "1 Mississippi" out loud. The second month I used a timer app. I was three months in before I even needed to print(end - start).

throw938383 4y ago

> There is no doubting Casey's chops when he talks about performance, Remember that everyone has their blind spots! I follow Casey on twitter, and a couple years ago there was a weird thread where he had hung his browser for 4-5 seconds by running some JS to assign CSS rules to ~50K div elements. And Casey was a million percent confident that the hang was due to JS being slow, and had nothing to do with CSS or DOM rendering.

wellanyway 4y ago

Because enterprise Java programmers never stare puzzled at anything.