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Abstraction should never be something "bad", if today "common" people is able to develop a basic game in seconds with flash, then why don't you try to compete w

by elboru 15y ago

Abstraction should never be something "bad", if today "common" people is able to develop a basic game in seconds with flash, then why don't you try to compete with big game companies? try to beat their graphics and their AI. "Nowadays? Grab a Flash development tutorial and you can do in a week what I spent most of high school learning and doing." Is like an electrical engineer complaining about assembler in favor of binary electrical pulses: "Nowadays? Grab a programming tutorial and you can do in a week what I spent most of high school learning and doing."

T-hawk 15y ago
Yes, abstractions lead to highly leveraged multipliers of effort, and to bigger results. For everyone like me whose golden age was DOS VGA programming, there was a Commodore 64 alumnus lamenting that it's no fun to have a flat high-color bitmap buffer, that the excitement in programming is to be found in squeezing impressive effects out of eight sprites and sixteen colors. The 80486 VGA machine can put out Doom, which by any measure is a bigger and more impressive result than say Choplifter, but it doesn't mean the C64 hacker would find Doom more fun to write. (He may, or may not.) My point is that finding excitement in programming can be intensely personal. I couldn't write Facebook in my DOS assembler, but that doesn't mean I find exciting the modern platform that can. Your electrical engineer couldn't write Angry Birds in hardware, but that doesn't mean he'll enjoy Objective-C just because it can. Not all programmers are motivated by results. The HN crowd skews that way, but there are many like me for whom it's not the destination but the journey that carries the real meaning.
- Craiggybear 15y ago
  Actually, you could write Facebook in x86 assembler but that would be a drudge! Oh ... and I do know an electronics engineer who probably could do Angry Birds in hardware, but almost certainly wouldn't want to. "What is Angry Birds" I can hear him say.

by elboru 15y ago

T-hawk 15y ago

Yes, abstractions lead to highly leveraged multipliers of effort, and to bigger results. For everyone like me whose golden age was DOS VGA programming, there was a Commodore 64 alumnus lamenting that it's no fun to have a flat high-color bitmap buffer, that the excitement in programming is to be found in squeezing impressive effects out of eight sprites and sixteen colors. The 80486 VGA machine can put out Doom, which by any measure is a bigger and more impressive result than say Choplifter, but it doesn't mean the C64 hacker would find Doom more fun to write. (He may, or may not.) My point is that finding excitement in programming can be intensely personal. I couldn't write Facebook in my DOS assembler, but that doesn't mean I find exciting the modern platform that can. Your electrical engineer couldn't write Angry Birds in hardware, but that doesn't mean he'll enjoy Objective-C just because it can. Not all programmers are motivated by results. The HN crowd skews that way, but there are many like me for whom it's not the destination but the journey that carries the real meaning.

Craiggybear 15y ago
Actually, you could write Facebook in x86 assembler but that would be a drudge! Oh ... and I do know an electronics engineer who probably could do Angry Birds in hardware, but almost certainly wouldn't want to. "What is Angry Birds" I can hear him say.