11 ms·

Cookie Clicker saved my PhD

417 points by azhenley 3y ago

embeng4096 3y ago
In the spirit of idle games, two that have really captured me are Swarm Simulator and Exponential Idle, the latter being pretty in a minimalist way. https://www.swarmsim.com/#/ https://www.swarmsim.com/#/ https://conicgames.github.io/exponentialidle/ https://conicgames.github.io/exponentialidle/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exponential-idle/id1538487382 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exponential-idle/id1538487382 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.conicgames.exponentialidle&hl=en_US&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.conicgames...
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  That swarmsim game crashed every 5 seconds after playing for 5 minutes and was using 100% of one of my CPU cores...
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  I played Swarm Simulator on iphone for a good while, it's a pretty compelling idle game. I'd say my main issue with idle games is how much they reward you for active play. In Cookie Clicker's case, at random, golden cookies will appear that when clicked apply a random boost, e.g. a 7x multiplier. Eventually you unlock upgrades so that another one may appear while the boost is active, leading to a double boost. The ultimate combination involves a multiplier, a boost to cookies per click (again active), then selling a lot of buildings for an additional short-lived bonus, then clicking like mad. You can earn a year's worth of idling / not playing within a minute then. If it's not more.
wbobeirne 3y ago
This article definitely captures the general joy I get being able to work with the web. I understand it has its warts, but there's something really magical about having one ecosystem where you can so seamlessly play with user input, network requests, audio, graphics, and it can be shared or deployed on basically any consumer hardware. I recently have undertaken a little side project that at first I assumed I was going to need to pick up an Arduino and hack together some physical inputs, LEDs for an interface, and a speaker. It wasn't until I started shopping around for pieces and learning about the tech stack that I realized I could just take my old phone, pop open a browser, and prototype it that way. There's a lot of complaints that not everything should be in the browser, and that's very true for a lot of cases, but it's extremely empowering that anything _could_ be in the browser, at least for your MVP.
- smohare 3y ago
  What you’re describing sounds pretty much like any programming language.
  - ajkjk 3y ago
    It really doesn't. It's much harder in every ecosystem except the web. Just shipping software to people at all is harder on every other platform, before even discussing how it's built.
    - progmetaldev 3y ago
      I completely agree, especially in terms of deployment and forced upgrades for bug fixes, or even software you don't want users to have anymore.
      - HenryMulligan 3y ago
        > software you don't want users to have anymore This is exactly why some don't want software essential to their business or personal life to be dependent on the whims of somebody and their server.
        progmetaldev 3y ago
        I agree with what you're saying, but I meant more if the developers opened up an API a bit too much. They can close that up and make their client software more stable.
        Sebb767 3y ago
        You can easily package your webapp with an integrated server or electron, if you don't want to provide a server. Or simply put it on the source code platform of your choice and let users figure out hosting on their own. Plus, you get all of that for (basically) free, at the same time with hardly any extra effort! The web really is the most versatile of platforms.
        3y ago
FredPret 3y ago
Time to fire up Universal Paperclips again...
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Cookie Clicker for me, again, sigh. I probably won't play for long. I hope, xD
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
> Previously, this might have taken me weeks. With JavaScript, I built the prototype in hours. I really like web/html/javascript for building UIs for this reason. It's really fast to prototype and get something decent looking/working, it has a very fast edit-compile-run loop (if you don't use any fancy tooling, as fast as you can press CTRL-S, Alt-Tab, F5), great debugging tools, and in the end, your product immediately works cross platform, both on desktop and mobile!
- failuser 3y ago
  How is this in any aspect better than Delphi from the ‘90s? And you get about the same performance with JavaScript on a modern CPU as ObjectPascal on an old Pentium.
  - regularfry 3y ago
    I can absolutely guarantee you that it didn't give you a consistent desktop and mobile experience.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - antonvs 3y ago
      That's mainly because there was no mobile experience back then. Not one that involved a graphical display, anyway.
  - yunohn 3y ago
    You’re right, ObjectPascal and JavaScript are the same experience! /s
  - ativzzz 3y ago
    Because every single person with a computer, including smartphones in the world with internet has access to a JS app via a web browser
  - marvin 3y ago
ubermonkey 3y ago
DEAR GOD I WILL NOT BE SUCKED BACK INTO AN INCREMENTAL GAME
B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
> many hours I spent tinkering and clicking away in my college dorm bedroom Grad students in dorms?
johndhi 3y ago
Just chiming in that I spent many hours playing this game. And there was also a text based one about breeding cats...
BMorearty 3y ago
This article asked me to click to accept cookies. :P
hahajk 3y ago
> One of the peculiar and interesting aspects of this game is that it rewards you for not playing it. Often, the next cookie purchase requires several orders of magnitude more cookies than you are currently producing, so you have no option but to leave the game alone, sometimes for days, before your cookie factories churn out enough cookies for you to unlock the next level of progress. A mechanic all too often ruined by desperate monetization.
- vikingerik 3y ago
  The paragraph you quoted isn't really true for Cookie Clicker nowadays. It's true that the next upgrade may require several orders of magnitude more than you have. But it's never necessary to leave the game alone for days; you can get those orders of magnitude much faster by stacking up buffs and combos with all the minigames (pantheon, garden, magic grimoire) and actively clicking all the golden cookies.
paulpauper 3y ago
It’s been 5 years since I finished my Ph.D. on user interfaces for machine learning. To celebrate/commiserate I had no idea it was possible to get a doctorate in such a thing.
lacoolj 3y ago
thanks for destroying my evening + rest of my life with a new addiction lol
mhandley 3y ago
Back in 1990 I was several years into a PhD in neural networks, having fun, but not really making especially useful progress. I spent a lot of time trying to get some simulated bugs to learn to move around, find food, and generally learn how to be better bugs. To help me understand why my learning algorithms didn't work, I'd written a nice graphical user interface, and generally camped out on a lovely Sun workstation belonging to some defunct research project, at least whenever I got to it first. About that time, the Bank of England issued a new five pound note and made huge claims that it could not be scanned. Supposedly they had designed in loads of high detail textures that would show weird aliasing artifacts on the 300 dpi colour scanners that were state of the art at the time. Challenge accepted! The Sun workstation I camped out on just happened to be connected to a nice 1200 dpi monochrome scanner. I went to my friends at the university theatre and returned with a whole stack of different coloured gels from the theatre lights. Then I took a whole series of scans of a £5 note through the various coloured gels, and wrote software to combine multiple monochrome scans into a colour image and re-align all the layers properly. As a result, my screen background was a perfect image on a supposedly unscannable £5 note. Six months later, I ran out of funding for my PhD without very much to show for it, but didn't fancy joining the real world. There were two research projects needing people, and I very much liked the idea of one on surgical robotics for neurosurgery, but I guess that was too ambitious and didn't get funded in the end. The one remaining project was on multimedia conferencing. Now, as an undergrad I had avoided all the classes on networking as I thought they would be boring, so I was spectacularly unqualified to do research on networked multimedia, but I applied anyway as I didn't really have any alternatives left. Of course the first question at interview was ``So, what do you know about multimedia?''. The honest answer would have been that I didn't know much at all, but that didn't seem to be what the Professor was hoping to hear. I couldn't think of anything else to talk about, so I told him all about faking £5 notes. A couple of days later I was really surprised to get offered the job, and a decade or so later, it was me that became Professor of Networked Systems. All because I couldn't resist the challenge to copy a £5 note.
- the_af 3y ago
  First, the anecdote is great. I enjoyed reading it. But why did the professor thought you scanning a bill had much to do with networked multimedia?
xhainingx 3y ago
I did not realize people actually played this game without the dev console
- rmuratov 3y ago
  It seems like 1. they did something to prevent abuse 2. it gets more effective to use instruments provided by the game pretty fast (than scripting clicks)
rock-rev 3y ago
In the mentioned Cern clicker the summer student seems to be the top end worker
ankitg12 3y ago
"Playing to wait" - Seems like someone talking about ChatGPT-4's 25 message/3 hour limit :)
redmerchant2 3y ago
The title is a bit hyperbolic but I enjoyed the sentiments nonetheless. I definitely remember as a kid learning Lua scripting because of video games. Just going over forum posts trying to make my own games or break other games. Definitely gave me the basis to rocket ahead when I took a formal CS class.
- DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Firmwarrior 3y ago
    When I was in college, there were basically two completely separate tiers of people in CS classes: People who knew how to program already, and people who didn't It was pretty nuts. The class was tuned to make it possible for non-coders to learn coding basics along with basics about data structures, compilers, blah blah blah. So for people who could already implement something like fizzbuzz, the class was a joke. We'd get an assignment to store something in a linked list and print it out, and some of the students made fully 3D animated demoscene demos out of it. (It just goes to show that treating college degrees like job programs is a terrible idea, if you ask me..)
    - DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
      Oh, my point was that the parent comment was being obnoxious by calling out the hyperbolic title (which is a totally normal place for hyperbole) when they themselves used hyperbole to tell their own anecdote. Like it was just a dumb thing to call out. I do agree that students who come into college often have an advantage, but they often have less of an advantage than they think, and it costs them because they end up not actually learning some of the less obvious skills that are being taught in a course setting. I found that the _best_ students in my cohort were those who started college with almost no programming experience but put in a lot of work. The next batch were those who came in with significant experience but were willing to reflect on it and adapt to the new information. Then kind of everybody else was mixed in depending on how they had taken things individually with no clear distinction between those with prior experience and those without.
hyperhello 3y ago
Basic web programming is a dream world for prototyping. You don’t even have a compile step; it’s all WYSIWYG.
- globalise83 3y ago
  I very often write little scripts that I can just copy and paste into the console in dev tools. Sometimes I even do this in customer demos to show what our product would look like in their web pages. To many people it really seems like magic.
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  Wait, you're saying it's possible to write web code without typescript, react, and node?
  - hyperhello 3y ago
    Interpreted languages are so improved by lengthy build processes involving compilers, linkers, transpiration, and sixteen different kinds of incompatible package formats, I don’t know why anyone would eschew them.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      I often wonder if a given manifestation of Poe's Law[0] is intentional. It seems not in this case, but damn if this isn't real. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
    - renlo 3y ago
      "transpiration"; is this the perspiration one gets when trying to use the JavaScript toolchain to transpile code?
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    Node? Who uses Node for anything serious in 2023? Real backend coding today is done using Bun. And yeah, you can write something in JavaScript, but it definitely won't scale and will constantly throw errors. Pretty much all serious frontend code today is written in Typescript across the board. /s
news_hacker 3y ago
The irony of a cookie popup showing up on the author’s blog..
JSLegendDev 3y ago
Morale of the story : What is useless today might be useful tomorrow.
kerblang 3y ago
I think for vanilla GUI where you only need readily available vanilla components, Java is fine. But I suppose you would be in for quite an adventure if you intend to do a lot of highly customized user interfaces. The curse of JavaScript is that you can readily devise newfangled componentry so easily that as a user, you end up with all sorts of unpredictable things where straightforward tasks become much harder thanks to endless gadgetification and whizbangery. The idea of "standard" flew out the window long ago. It would be exaggeration to say QWOP has become the new normal, but only by so much... Eventually we'll get tired of this and straighten up, I'm sure. Maybe menu mnemonics will make a comeback (they really are a good idea).
- jerf 3y ago
  I'd love to try to prototype a GUI that harmonizes GUIs with keyboard accessibility; bring back some external component model to script them again, put some sort of effort into making that scriptability discoverable for users and easier to maintain for developers than Applescript was, make it easy to give and surface expert-level shortcuts, make it so keystrokes are buffered across contexts so you can develop expert-level skills in pre-keying what you want the UI to do even before it pops up (one of the reasons why you had to pry the console-based point-of-sale software out of customer's services hands at gunpoint), and just generally make something useful for experts again... but it's years of effort to even prototype such a thing to the point where it's useful for anything. GUIs are stuck in the 20th century because they're just so big.
fullstop 3y ago
See also: Universal Paperclips - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
- _def 3y ago
  pls no. I even bought a zipper after I played it because it impressed me so much. It was rather expensive but the quality was pretty poor.
- l__l 3y ago
  And Exponential Idle!! https://conicgames.github.io/exponentialidle/ https://conicgames.github.io/exponentialidle/
- wging 3y ago
  A Dark Room has a similar feel, and like Universal Paperclips it opens up to be much more than a clicker: https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/mobileWarning.html https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/mobileWarning.html
  - None4U 3y ago
    that's not a good link
    - Groxx 3y ago
      To clarify this a bit: the link goes directly to the mobile warning redirect, whether or not you're on mobile. https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com is a link to the main site.
    - wging 3y ago
      Yeah, you’re right. Sorry. I missed the edit window and can’t fix it. Someone else has posted the right one.
- ge96 3y ago
  ugh... I can't remember the name someone posted a game here before web-based, you're in a terminal/folders structure, as an AI trying to escape into the net
simmschi 3y ago
Must ... not ... open ... Cookie Clicker
- mnsc 3y ago
  Do it! The Final Building has been released. It's all new minigames from now on.
intensific_90 3y ago
That’s great! I have a son who writes mods and is constantly mucking around with CC code.. can’t say I get it but draw inspiration where you can!
naet 3y ago
Maybe JavaScript is actually what saved your PHD, although cookie clicker was what pointed you in that direction. Certain people love to talk trash on JS for many different reasons, some probably valid ones too, but you can do so much with just a basic understanding. I've probably never felt as empowered in my entire life as when I learned a bit of HTML CSS and JS; it was like I l suddenly had the tools to make tons of new projects. I didn't feel this way using Python or C (those had felt very command line oriented the way I had learned them), but when I saw how easy it was to use JS and make an interactive web page I felt like I could make full applications, games and toys and whatever else I wanted to. Having the browser to draw images and UIs and access to built in features like the HTML canvas or web audio APIs made dream projects feel much more achievable.
- DantesKite 3y ago
  > Maybe JavaScript is actually what saved your PHD, although cookie clicker was what pointed you in that direction. Yes the article strongly implies this with some added nuance: > I’m extremely grateful to Cookie Clicker for the journey it put me on, but even if I hadn’t ended up learning JavaScript because of it, I still wouldn’t regret, and would cherish, the many many hours I spent tinkering and clicking away in my college dorm bedroom.
- noman-land 3y ago
  I couldn't agree more. The browser has everything you need to make an insanely wide array of rich and dynamic applications with just HTML, CSS, and JS. Learning that a browser and a notepad are all you need to have a basically zero second feedback loop in an iterative development experience was pretty breathtaking the first time I press reload and some stuff moved around.
- gretch 3y ago
  I fully agree with this. A couple months ago I tried to do a quick hack project where I could get the computer to play a sound and render an image when there was a keystroke. Turns out with python, without additional libraries, you had to read from stdin which requires the user to end the input with newline before python could read the char. (2 keystrokes, not 1) But I switched to JS where it’s trivial to intercept single key strokes and finished my script in ~30 minutes
caust1c 3y ago
Related to this, Eve online opened the door for me to learn a ton about markets and economics I didn't even know I wanted to know, but it fascinated me. Traded my way into free-play before my grades started to slip so I quit.

417 points by azhenley 3y ago

In the spirit of idle games, two that have really captured me are Swarm Simulator and Exponential Idle, the latter being pretty in a minimalist way. https://www.swarmsim.com/#/ https://www.swarmsim.com/#/ https://conicgames.github.io/exponentialidle/ https://conicgames.github.io/exponentialidle/ https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exponential-idle/id1538487382 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exponential-idle/id1538487382 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.conicgames.exponentialidle&hl=en_US&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.conicgames...

iLoveOncall 3y ago
That swarmsim game crashed every 5 seconds after playing for 5 minutes and was using 100% of one of my CPU cores...
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I played Swarm Simulator on iphone for a good while, it's a pretty compelling idle game. I'd say my main issue with idle games is how much they reward you for active play. In Cookie Clicker's case, at random, golden cookies will appear that when clicked apply a random boost, e.g. a 7x multiplier. Eventually you unlock upgrades so that another one may appear while the boost is active, leading to a double boost. The ultimate combination involves a multiplier, a boost to cookies per click (again active), then selling a lot of buildings for an additional short-lived bonus, then clicking like mad. You can earn a year's worth of idling / not playing within a minute then. If it's not more.

wbobeirne 3y ago

This article definitely captures the general joy I get being able to work with the web. I understand it has its warts, but there's something really magical about having one ecosystem where you can so seamlessly play with user input, network requests, audio, graphics, and it can be shared or deployed on basically any consumer hardware. I recently have undertaken a little side project that at first I assumed I was going to need to pick up an Arduino and hack together some physical inputs, LEDs for an interface, and a speaker. It wasn't until I started shopping around for pieces and learning about the tech stack that I realized I could just take my old phone, pop open a browser, and prototype it that way. There's a lot of complaints that not everything should be in the browser, and that's very true for a lot of cases, but it's extremely empowering that anything _could_ be in the browser, at least for your MVP.

smohare 3y ago
What you’re describing sounds pretty much like any programming language.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  It really doesn't. It's much harder in every ecosystem except the web. Just shipping software to people at all is harder on every other platform, before even discussing how it's built.
  - progmetaldev 3y ago
    I completely agree, especially in terms of deployment and forced upgrades for bug fixes, or even software you don't want users to have anymore.
    - HenryMulligan 3y ago
      > software you don't want users to have anymore This is exactly why some don't want software essential to their business or personal life to be dependent on the whims of somebody and their server.
      - progmetaldev 3y ago
        I agree with what you're saying, but I meant more if the developers opened up an API a bit too much. They can close that up and make their client software more stable.
      - Sebb767 3y ago
        You can easily package your webapp with an integrated server or electron, if you don't want to provide a server. Or simply put it on the source code platform of your choice and let users figure out hosting on their own. Plus, you get all of that for (basically) free, at the same time with hardly any extra effort! The web really is the most versatile of platforms.
      - 3y ago

FredPret 3y ago

Time to fire up Universal Paperclips again...

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Cookie Clicker for me, again, sigh. I probably won't play for long. I hope, xD

tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago

> Previously, this might have taken me weeks. With JavaScript, I built the prototype in hours. I really like web/html/javascript for building UIs for this reason. It's really fast to prototype and get something decent looking/working, it has a very fast edit-compile-run loop (if you don't use any fancy tooling, as fast as you can press CTRL-S, Alt-Tab, F5), great debugging tools, and in the end, your product immediately works cross platform, both on desktop and mobile!

failuser 3y ago
How is this in any aspect better than Delphi from the ‘90s? And you get about the same performance with JavaScript on a modern CPU as ObjectPascal on an old Pentium.
- regularfry 3y ago
  I can absolutely guarantee you that it didn't give you a consistent desktop and mobile experience.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - antonvs 3y ago
    That's mainly because there was no mobile experience back then. Not one that involved a graphical display, anyway.
- yunohn 3y ago
  You’re right, ObjectPascal and JavaScript are the same experience! /s
- ativzzz 3y ago
  Because every single person with a computer, including smartphones in the world with internet has access to a JS app via a web browser
- marvin 3y ago

ubermonkey 3y ago

DEAR GOD I WILL NOT BE SUCKED BACK INTO AN INCREMENTAL GAME

B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago

> many hours I spent tinkering and clicking away in my college dorm bedroom Grad students in dorms?

johndhi 3y ago

Just chiming in that I spent many hours playing this game. And there was also a text based one about breeding cats...

BMorearty 3y ago

This article asked me to click to accept cookies. :P

hahajk 3y ago

> One of the peculiar and interesting aspects of this game is that it rewards you for not playing it. Often, the next cookie purchase requires several orders of magnitude more cookies than you are currently producing, so you have no option but to leave the game alone, sometimes for days, before your cookie factories churn out enough cookies for you to unlock the next level of progress. A mechanic all too often ruined by desperate monetization.

vikingerik 3y ago
The paragraph you quoted isn't really true for Cookie Clicker nowadays. It's true that the next upgrade may require several orders of magnitude more than you have. But it's never necessary to leave the game alone for days; you can get those orders of magnitude much faster by stacking up buffs and combos with all the minigames (pantheon, garden, magic grimoire) and actively clicking all the golden cookies.

paulpauper 3y ago

It’s been 5 years since I finished my Ph.D. on user interfaces for machine learning. To celebrate/commiserate I had no idea it was possible to get a doctorate in such a thing.

lacoolj 3y ago

thanks for destroying my evening + rest of my life with a new addiction lol

mhandley 3y ago

Back in 1990 I was several years into a PhD in neural networks, having fun, but not really making especially useful progress. I spent a lot of time trying to get some simulated bugs to learn to move around, find food, and generally learn how to be better bugs. To help me understand why my learning algorithms didn't work, I'd written a nice graphical user interface, and generally camped out on a lovely Sun workstation belonging to some defunct research project, at least whenever I got to it first. About that time, the Bank of England issued a new five pound note and made huge claims that it could not be scanned. Supposedly they had designed in loads of high detail textures that would show weird aliasing artifacts on the 300 dpi colour scanners that were state of the art at the time. Challenge accepted! The Sun workstation I camped out on just happened to be connected to a nice 1200 dpi monochrome scanner. I went to my friends at the university theatre and returned with a whole stack of different coloured gels from the theatre lights. Then I took a whole series of scans of a £5 note through the various coloured gels, and wrote software to combine multiple monochrome scans into a colour image and re-align all the layers properly. As a result, my screen background was a perfect image on a supposedly unscannable £5 note. Six months later, I ran out of funding for my PhD without very much to show for it, but didn't fancy joining the real world. There were two research projects needing people, and I very much liked the idea of one on surgical robotics for neurosurgery, but I guess that was too ambitious and didn't get funded in the end. The one remaining project was on multimedia conferencing. Now, as an undergrad I had avoided all the classes on networking as I thought they would be boring, so I was spectacularly unqualified to do research on networked multimedia, but I applied anyway as I didn't really have any alternatives left. Of course the first question at interview was ``So, what do you know about multimedia?''. The honest answer would have been that I didn't know much at all, but that didn't seem to be what the Professor was hoping to hear. I couldn't think of anything else to talk about, so I told him all about faking £5 notes. A couple of days later I was really surprised to get offered the job, and a decade or so later, it was me that became Professor of Networked Systems. All because I couldn't resist the challenge to copy a £5 note.

the_af 3y ago
First, the anecdote is great. I enjoyed reading it. But why did the professor thought you scanning a bill had much to do with networked multimedia?

xhainingx 3y ago

I did not realize people actually played this game without the dev console

rmuratov 3y ago
It seems like 1. they did something to prevent abuse 2. it gets more effective to use instruments provided by the game pretty fast (than scripting clicks)

rock-rev 3y ago

In the mentioned Cern clicker the summer student seems to be the top end worker

ankitg12 3y ago

"Playing to wait" - Seems like someone talking about ChatGPT-4's 25 message/3 hour limit :)

redmerchant2 3y ago

The title is a bit hyperbolic but I enjoyed the sentiments nonetheless. I definitely remember as a kid learning Lua scripting because of video games. Just going over forum posts trying to make my own games or break other games. Definitely gave me the basis to rocket ahead when I took a formal CS class.

DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
[flagged]
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  When I was in college, there were basically two completely separate tiers of people in CS classes: People who knew how to program already, and people who didn't It was pretty nuts. The class was tuned to make it possible for non-coders to learn coding basics along with basics about data structures, compilers, blah blah blah. So for people who could already implement something like fizzbuzz, the class was a joke. We'd get an assignment to store something in a linked list and print it out, and some of the students made fully 3D animated demoscene demos out of it. (It just goes to show that treating college degrees like job programs is a terrible idea, if you ask me..)
  - DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
    Oh, my point was that the parent comment was being obnoxious by calling out the hyperbolic title (which is a totally normal place for hyperbole) when they themselves used hyperbole to tell their own anecdote. Like it was just a dumb thing to call out. I do agree that students who come into college often have an advantage, but they often have less of an advantage than they think, and it costs them because they end up not actually learning some of the less obvious skills that are being taught in a course setting. I found that the _best_ students in my cohort were those who started college with almost no programming experience but put in a lot of work. The next batch were those who came in with significant experience but were willing to reflect on it and adapt to the new information. Then kind of everybody else was mixed in depending on how they had taken things individually with no clear distinction between those with prior experience and those without.

hyperhello 3y ago

Basic web programming is a dream world for prototyping. You don’t even have a compile step; it’s all WYSIWYG.

globalise83 3y ago
I very often write little scripts that I can just copy and paste into the console in dev tools. Sometimes I even do this in customer demos to show what our product would look like in their web pages. To many people it really seems like magic.
Firmwarrior 3y ago
Wait, you're saying it's possible to write web code without typescript, react, and node?
- hyperhello 3y ago
  Interpreted languages are so improved by lengthy build processes involving compilers, linkers, transpiration, and sixteen different kinds of incompatible package formats, I don’t know why anyone would eschew them.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    I often wonder if a given manifestation of Poe's Law[0] is intentional. It seems not in this case, but damn if this isn't real. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
  - renlo 3y ago
    "transpiration"; is this the perspiration one gets when trying to use the JavaScript toolchain to transpile code?
- ravenstine 3y ago
  Node? Who uses Node for anything serious in 2023? Real backend coding today is done using Bun. And yeah, you can write something in JavaScript, but it definitely won't scale and will constantly throw errors. Pretty much all serious frontend code today is written in Typescript across the board. /s

news_hacker 3y ago

The irony of a cookie popup showing up on the author’s blog..

JSLegendDev 3y ago

Morale of the story : What is useless today might be useful tomorrow.

kerblang 3y ago

I think for vanilla GUI where you only need readily available vanilla components, Java is fine. But I suppose you would be in for quite an adventure if you intend to do a lot of highly customized user interfaces. The curse of JavaScript is that you can readily devise newfangled componentry so easily that as a user, you end up with all sorts of unpredictable things where straightforward tasks become much harder thanks to endless gadgetification and whizbangery. The idea of "standard" flew out the window long ago. It would be exaggeration to say QWOP has become the new normal, but only by so much... Eventually we'll get tired of this and straighten up, I'm sure. Maybe menu mnemonics will make a comeback (they really are a good idea).

jerf 3y ago
I'd love to try to prototype a GUI that harmonizes GUIs with keyboard accessibility; bring back some external component model to script them again, put some sort of effort into making that scriptability discoverable for users and easier to maintain for developers than Applescript was, make it easy to give and surface expert-level shortcuts, make it so keystrokes are buffered across contexts so you can develop expert-level skills in pre-keying what you want the UI to do even before it pops up (one of the reasons why you had to pry the console-based point-of-sale software out of customer's services hands at gunpoint), and just generally make something useful for experts again... but it's years of effort to even prototype such a thing to the point where it's useful for anything. GUIs are stuck in the 20th century because they're just so big.

fullstop 3y ago

See also: Universal Paperclips - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

_def 3y ago
pls no. I even bought a zipper after I played it because it impressed me so much. It was rather expensive but the quality was pretty poor.
l__l 3y ago
And Exponential Idle!! https://conicgames.github.io/exponentialidle/ https://conicgames.github.io/exponentialidle/
wging 3y ago
A Dark Room has a similar feel, and like Universal Paperclips it opens up to be much more than a clicker: https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/mobileWarning.html https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/mobileWarning.html
- None4U 3y ago
  that's not a good link
  - Groxx 3y ago
    To clarify this a bit: the link goes directly to the mobile warning redirect, whether or not you're on mobile. https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com is a link to the main site.
  - wging 3y ago
    Yeah, you’re right. Sorry. I missed the edit window and can’t fix it. Someone else has posted the right one.
ge96 3y ago
ugh... I can't remember the name someone posted a game here before web-based, you're in a terminal/folders structure, as an AI trying to escape into the net

simmschi 3y ago

Must ... not ... open ... Cookie Clicker

mnsc 3y ago
Do it! The Final Building has been released. It's all new minigames from now on.

intensific_90 3y ago

That’s great! I have a son who writes mods and is constantly mucking around with CC code.. can’t say I get it but draw inspiration where you can!

naet 3y ago

Maybe JavaScript is actually what saved your PHD, although cookie clicker was what pointed you in that direction. Certain people love to talk trash on JS for many different reasons, some probably valid ones too, but you can do so much with just a basic understanding. I've probably never felt as empowered in my entire life as when I learned a bit of HTML CSS and JS; it was like I l suddenly had the tools to make tons of new projects. I didn't feel this way using Python or C (those had felt very command line oriented the way I had learned them), but when I saw how easy it was to use JS and make an interactive web page I felt like I could make full applications, games and toys and whatever else I wanted to. Having the browser to draw images and UIs and access to built in features like the HTML canvas or web audio APIs made dream projects feel much more achievable.

DantesKite 3y ago
> Maybe JavaScript is actually what saved your PHD, although cookie clicker was what pointed you in that direction. Yes the article strongly implies this with some added nuance: > I’m extremely grateful to Cookie Clicker for the journey it put me on, but even if I hadn’t ended up learning JavaScript because of it, I still wouldn’t regret, and would cherish, the many many hours I spent tinkering and clicking away in my college dorm bedroom.
noman-land 3y ago
I couldn't agree more. The browser has everything you need to make an insanely wide array of rich and dynamic applications with just HTML, CSS, and JS. Learning that a browser and a notepad are all you need to have a basically zero second feedback loop in an iterative development experience was pretty breathtaking the first time I press reload and some stuff moved around.
gretch 3y ago
I fully agree with this. A couple months ago I tried to do a quick hack project where I could get the computer to play a sound and render an image when there was a keystroke. Turns out with python, without additional libraries, you had to read from stdin which requires the user to end the input with newline before python could read the char. (2 keystrokes, not 1) But I switched to JS where it’s trivial to intercept single key strokes and finished my script in ~30 minutes

caust1c 3y ago

Related to this, Eve online opened the door for me to learn a ton about markets and economics I didn't even know I wanted to know, but it fascinated me. Traded my way into free-play before my grades started to slip so I quit.