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The funny thing is: a program of 1000 lines, you can hold completely in your head. You don't even need test cases to tell you what you'll break by changing this or that, but even that's ok, because you won't have to change anything ever in an assignment. Plus, the scope is always simple enough so it either works or it doesn't, and you can manually prove one or the other in 5 minutes. (E.g., if your assignment is a heap sort, wth, you can just type in some numbers and see if they come out sorted. Why would you bother with a unit test for that?) You don't even need a good architecture or clear interfaces, because again, you'll never have to re-discover what it does or ever have to change it. It's always by definition write-only, so it's OK to write write-only code. Even 10,000 lines, if you're reasonably smart, you can do it. And that's already more code than in _any_ college assignement ever. Move on to the real life and a 1,000,000 line project (which is actually a small one), and all the cool write-only hacks and the "it'll be manually tested at the end anyway" mentality you learned in college become a liability. You have to actually unlearn all the write-only habits that college taught you, and learn how to actually produce quality code.

The problem is programming tools are in the dark ages, you shouldn't have to remember lines of code, or even be able to read someone elses jargon code and try to figure out what it represents in how it actually works. The symbolic codespace is holding us back is stuck in arcane symbolic space when programming entities really need to be visualized and solidified into functional geometric objects that can be rendered and seen as "real objects" (as one would see a gear in a machine in the real world) within the compiler and tools of the language itself. In my opinion this is why software engineering is "more art then science" it's because you're trying to create great works with tools that haven't improved very much, its like trying to build a modern CPU with "hammers and nails", or the tools they used to make the very first CPU's.

That is the problem, most computer languages today are quite literally trapped by mathematical and symbolic terrorists and that is why "programming is so arcane" it's because the tools are jargified (i.e. prone to jargon and not real world definitions). It's stuck in the abstract, just remember mathematics is the abstractilization of the visual world we live in. So programming and tools should focus on the reverse: They should be the virtualization of the abstract into a visual model, or visual world. To coin a new phrase:: Digital Infophysics. Programming large projects wouldn't be so difficult if the tools to engineer the actual info-physical components of a project could be rendered visually, animated in 3D, and could be walked through in real-time like you would in a game rendering say a city street or substructure of a city.

An interesting post on bookofhook here -- http://www.bookofhook.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=80 4

Carmack is really good as a person who pushes teh technology.

As a game developer, though, it's just not there. anytime I hear about an id game now, I just wait until someone brings out a truly great game using the engine that Carmack has developed.

Yes, I'm surprised that they thought nostalgia would make Doom3 a hit. In fact, there was supposedly quite a bit of internal turmoil regarding on whether to even do a Doom3. I can't find the link right now because I originally got it off of Brian Hook's web site forums, but apparently one of the long-time co-owner artists got fired from id and is now suing id. This might have had something to do with a buyout from Activision, but like I said, I can't find the link right now.

In any case, it seems that Id really needs a big hit in the next 4-5 years to stay relevant, unless Carmack and company are happy doing engines and tech demos. I wonder if they could pull off a planetside (FPS/MMOG). But let's hope that they're not thinking about another corridor based FPS.

It's not 1994 anymore when Carmack was the God of software rasterization.

Yes. It's the same Hook from id, 3dfx, and all those other gaming-related companies. His bio has more details.

My Off-Shoring Experience
Friday, January 14, 2005

A lot of talk has been going around about the effect of off-shore programming and us highly overpaid Western programmers. Conventional wisdom dictates that someone in Eastern Europe or India can write great code for a fraction of the price that someone like, say, me, can. We're talking $8-15/hour here, which is what someone working at Starbucks can expect to make (with benefits). Because I had a small project, I figured, what the hell, let's see what this is all about.

ie, Brian's experience with "offshoring" via RentACoder for a piece of the ActiveX work this slashdot article refers to. The security rant is old news.