3 ms·

I'm sorry to rain on this parade, but I fail to see the merit of spending so much effort - and writing so much code, generating so much data, working 18hr days

I'm sorry to rain on this parade, but I fail to see the merit of spending so much effort - and writing so much code, generating so much data, working 18hr days etc. - to render Doom in TypeScript type-checker. I mean, there all sorts of feats and achievements one could choose as one's goal, which would also be impressive, but would be more useful to users and/or software developers, than this. I'm just thinking of all of those times I wanted to suggest a software tool to someone and went "ungh, if there was only some FOSS which did that" - and there wasn't, or at least, it wasn't assebled from pieces into something usable. Then I think about spending a person-year on this and I get frustrated. Sorry, but those are my 2 cents.

saagarjha 2y ago
Yes, but think of how much joy it brings to so many people.
- einpoklum 2y ago
  Think of how much joy it would bring to people if the author would work on a piece of software which would be consistently useful beyond the one-time novelty. Of course, it's a matter of proportion - I'm not saying that only things of utility and no "fun" stuff need ever be produced; but this is a rather extreme case.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Probably less.
dimitropoulos 2y ago
hi! author here! this doesn't rain on my parade at all! actually I really appreciate what you're saying, so thanks for saying it! until yesterday, I did this whole thing in isolation (aside from a few of my close friends in a then-private-now-public discord channel patting me on the back every few days when I'd get stuck with no idea how to get unstuck). I realize that what I'm going to say next will be alarming to some people, but as nice as it is to hear all these wonderful just super heartwarming things from people over the last day (thank you!!) I have a kind of brain that would have been roughly equally satisfied if after completing it, I closed VS Code and never mentioned it to anyone again. For a different example, I used to spend most of my time making music and being in many bands and whatnot and I have, not exaggerating, like 200 hours of unreleased finished music - some even with album art (back when we had CDs haha). Probably 50 hours no one but me has ever heard and 50 hours only my wife has heard in the background while I worked on it and the rest just close friends. But when my close friends urge me to just release it... I just.... why? I do really really love to share, and I have (all the MiTS music https://soundcloud.com/michigan-typescript https://soundcloud.com/michigan-typescript is open source with the BitWig sets available https://github.com/michigantypescript/music https://github.com/michigantypescript/music), but it honestly doesn't bring me a lot of satisfaction. Creating though... just simply creating and learning how to do new things brings me just a tsunami of satisfaction. I don't know how else to explain it. I'm just wired this way. I can't help it. It's like breathing. If I am lucky enough to grow old, I'm gonna be the grandpa in his basement with all the oscilloscopes trying to fix a Ham radio, even though I have no purpose for fixing it. I can tell you already. That said, I'm relived to say that when it comes to this Doom project I learned SO SO SO many things that have been VERY VERY directly applicable to my career as a software engineer. In that way, ALONE, it was worth the effort. It's like multiple times per week that I'm able to help or contribute to something at my company with my team that was a skill I picked up on this project. I've contributed quite a lot over my career to FOSS and I can tell you that many of the most useful contributions really started in really strange places with strange motivations. What's beautiful is that none of that matters to the user - they see functions and functionality and never know what's behind the curtain for why someone was motivated enough to really make it happen. So to cap it off, I'd say, that actually what you're seeing in this Doom project is literally the best possible path to get what you say you want. There's nothing commercial about this, but if it gets people excited and gives people energy and capabilities to contribute to FOSS (even if it's just me, the author) - then now yer' cookin with gas.

saagarjha 2y ago

Yes, but think of how much joy it brings to so many people.

einpoklum 2y ago
Think of how much joy it would bring to people if the author would work on a piece of software which would be consistently useful beyond the one-time novelty. Of course, it's a matter of proportion - I'm not saying that only things of utility and no "fun" stuff need ever be produced; but this is a rather extreme case.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Probably less.

dimitropoulos 2y ago

hi! author here! this doesn't rain on my parade at all! actually I really appreciate what you're saying, so thanks for saying it! until yesterday, I did this whole thing in isolation (aside from a few of my close friends in a then-private-now-public discord channel patting me on the back every few days when I'd get stuck with no idea how to get unstuck). I realize that what I'm going to say next will be alarming to some people, but as nice as it is to hear all these wonderful just super heartwarming things from people over the last day (thank you!!) I have a kind of brain that would have been roughly equally satisfied if after completing it, I closed VS Code and never mentioned it to anyone again. For a different example, I used to spend most of my time making music and being in many bands and whatnot and I have, not exaggerating, like 200 hours of unreleased finished music - some even with album art (back when we had CDs haha). Probably 50 hours no one but me has ever heard and 50 hours only my wife has heard in the background while I worked on it and the rest just close friends. But when my close friends urge me to just release it... I just.... why? I do really really love to share, and I have (all the MiTS music https://soundcloud.com/michigan-typescript https://soundcloud.com/michigan-typescript is open source with the BitWig sets available https://github.com/michigantypescript/music https://github.com/michigantypescript/music), but it honestly doesn't bring me a lot of satisfaction. Creating though... just simply creating and learning how to do new things brings me just a tsunami of satisfaction. I don't know how else to explain it. I'm just wired this way. I can't help it. It's like breathing. If I am lucky enough to grow old, I'm gonna be the grandpa in his basement with all the oscilloscopes trying to fix a Ham radio, even though I have no purpose for fixing it. I can tell you already. That said, I'm relived to say that when it comes to this Doom project I learned SO SO SO many things that have been VERY VERY directly applicable to my career as a software engineer. In that way, ALONE, it was worth the effort. It's like multiple times per week that I'm able to help or contribute to something at my company with my team that was a skill I picked up on this project. I've contributed quite a lot over my career to FOSS and I can tell you that many of the most useful contributions really started in really strange places with strange motivations. What's beautiful is that none of that matters to the user - they see functions and functionality and never know what's behind the curtain for why someone was motivated enough to really make it happen. So to cap it off, I'd say, that actually what you're seeing in this Doom project is literally the best possible path to get what you say you want. There's nothing commercial about this, but if it gets people excited and gives people energy and capabilities to contribute to FOSS (even if it's just me, the author) - then now yer' cookin with gas.