https://prog21.dadgum.com/143.html

programming in the
twenty-first century

It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to
implement your ideas.

The Silent Majority of Experts

When I still followed the Usenet group comp.lang.forth, I wasn't the
only person frustrated by the lack of people doing interesting things
with the language. Elizabeth Rather, co-founder of Forth, Inc.,
offered the following explanation: there are people solving real
problems with Forth, but they don't hang-out in the newsgroup. She
would know; her company exists to support the construction of
commercial Forth projects.

In 1996 I worked on a port of The Need for Speed to the SEGA Saturn.
(If you think that's an odd system to be involved with, I also did
3DO development, went to a Jaguar conference at Atari headquarters,
and had an official set of Virtual Boy documentation.) There were a
number of game developers with public faces in the 1990s, but the key
people responsible for the original version of The Need for Speed,
released in 1994, remained unknown and behind the scenes. That's even
though they had written a game based around rigid-body physics before
most developers had any idea that term was relevant to 3D video
games. And they did it without an FPU: the whole engine used
fixed-point math.

Yes, there are many people who blog and otherwise publicly discuss
development methodologies and what they're working on, but there are
even more people who don't. Blogging takes time, for example, and not
everyone enjoys it. Other people are working on commercial products
and can't divulge the inner workings of their code.

That we're unable to learn from the silent majority of experts casts
an unusual light upon online discussions. Just because looking down
your nose at C++ or Perl is the popular opinion doesn't mean that
those languages aren't being used by very smart folks to build
amazing, finely crafted software. An appealing theory that gets
frantically upvoted may have well-understood but non-obvious
drawbacks. All we're seeing is an intersection of the people working
on interesting things and who like to write about it--and that's not
the whole story.

Your time may better spent getting in there and trying things rather
than reading about what other people think.

(If you liked this, you might enjoy Photography as a Non-Technical
Hobby.)

permalink June 21, 2012

previously

  * Your Coding Philosophies are Irrelevant
  * Another Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of
  * The Pace of Technology is Slower than You Think
  * We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines
  * You, Too, Can Be on the Cutting Edge of Functional Programming
    Research

archives

twitter / mail

I'm James Hague, a recovering programmer who has been designing video
games since the 1980s. Programming Without Being Obsessed With
Programming and Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry are
good starting points. For the older stuff, try the 2012 Retrospective
.

Where are the comments?