- Why does Swift have both a "var" keyword and a "let" keyword? One should be sufficient with the other being a default behavior. If a symbol is not declared "var" then just assume it is constant or visa versa. Furthermore, it may not be necessary to have either of the key words because (I think) in every case, the need for variability and mutation should be determinable by the compiler. Type is already being inferred by the compiler, and mutability could reasonably be considered an aspect of type.
Well, for one reason, so that you'll catch typeos in variable names at compile time. You have to explicitly declare the symbols you're going to use.
People do amazing things when they feel like the thing they're creating is an extension of themselves. Far more than any engineering process or philosophy I've seen, the best work I've seen in my career is from people who identify strongly with their work.
Go into drama. You'll spend lots of time interacting directly with women, and if you get the right material, possibly fooling around with them. All for the sake of art, of course.
Actually, it's The Farnsworth Parabox. It had boxes! And a PAIR of them! HA! And then there were more than two boxes, but let's forget about that for the moment.
>Also, god damn it's hard to find a pair of regular, black, work-appropriate shoes that don't have 4 inch heels or are ugly as sin. Few things infuriate me more than shoe shopping.
>/female
That would've been so much more awesome if you were a dude.
Actually, that's only one kind of ad. There are a bunch of different basic types, not all of which attempt to work on subconscious associations.
Check it out:
http://www.slate.com/id/2170872/nav/tap1/
Actually it can be creative animation. The difference is that the animation is being done by the actor, rather than someone sitting at a desk (although there's probably someone doing some cleanup work).
Don Norman argues that Google isn't simple at all. Sure, searching with it is, but Google does way more than search - and if you're not looking to search, you're going to have difficulty finding things. It's all argued here:
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/the_truth_about.html
Silent Hill was probably one of the best videogame movies I've seen.
It's currently sitting at 25% on the Tomatometer. The 'Cream of the Crop' give it no good reviews. But your statement may be right - it may still be better than most of the videogame movies that have been made.
These movies are garbage. The basic story in pretty much any videogame wouldn't be up to the standards of a highschool creative writing class. There's never anything interesting there to work with - at least, nothing that hasn't been done better in a hundred low-budget sci-fi, fantasy or horror flicks.
The fact that there's a generation growing up thinking that these are decent (or even 'decent enough') movies is a sad state of affairs, and it doesn't bode well at all for what we'll see coming down the pipes a decade or two hence.
Sorry if I come across as a know-it-all outsider here. I'm really not trying to start any kind of a flame war, but as someone who's well-qualified to work in the games biz, and until recently very much wanted to do so, I'm not a fan of the "we're so different" attitude in the industry.
It's because of that kind of talk I've stopped looking at jobs in the game industry. I just can't see how every time a game is made, especially when so many of them are so similar, each problem is something new that hasn't been done before, and the whole thing is some huge creative endeavour. I'm sure that's part of it, and hopefully each game has something new and cool, but still - most of the code is, or at least should be, well-maintained, well-written, mature, and stable.
It should be engineered in such a way that adding new functionality doesn't mean starting from scratch or digging deep into the code and changing things at the lowest level, but rather it should mean working with a well-designed interface. There should be good test coverage, and you should be able to drop features from the product if you have to make a deadline, since that's better than half-implemented features that don't work or aren't tested.
I recently had a job interview with a game company, and had a list of questions about their engineering practices. After getting the pitch from the president, who talked about the hours they worked for the last title they shipped, and how they really really didn't want that to happen again - but he still said there'd be long hours - I knew that it would indeed happen again, and there was no point asking my questions since it was clear that the answer to a significant number would be "no."
I understand that there are things that make games different from other types of software, but good engineering is good engineering, and it should be adopted by the industry. That almost every algorithm is mostly R&D rings false to me, since most games sure don't feel like there's much new in them.
If there's something that the game completely depends on, and no-one knows how to do it, then don't greenlight the game. Figure out how to do that critical thing first, get it working, and then invest in the game. That's how things are done in the rest of the software industry, and it's a very good thing: it means as cool as an idea sounds, if it can't be done, you don't want to waste a lot of money on it. Lots of new features in lots of software is almost all R&D, but it doesn't mean the product can't be scheduled or that gobs of money should be wasted on something that might not go anywhere no matter how cool it would be if it worked.
How much better would Oblivion be, to take a random example, if they realised early on that the AI sucked and they needed to take a different approach, and designed around that? Instead you can burn someone's house down as they happily tell you plot points in the story (or so I've heard - haven't played it myself).
I don't doubt that there are elements of game design which are very difficult to schedule. But to say the whole game is like that sounds like a cop-out.
I'm a largely self-taught programmer (I have a pure mathematics background - no programming required!) currently working at a top software company. I got here largely because of the initiative I showed working on personal projects. So I think the best thing to do for you would be to pick a project you find interesting, and implement it at home. Having something solid you can point to and say, "I did that," can be pretty persuasive.
I once met a girl whose father was an important VP at Pepsi. And man, was she serious about her Pepsi. She told me about how Coke was doing all these underhanded things to keep Pepsi in their place, how Pepsi deserves to be at the top, and I doubt she's ever tried Coke in her life*. It was kind of scary - this was really, really important stuff to her. About sugar water.
So I have no trouble seeing the kids of the head of Microsoft being anti anything-not-by-MS. When you pick up your parents' religion as a child, it's not just the organized kind.
*Well, okay, she did plenty of coke. Just not the drinkable kind.
I recently played D&D for the first time in a bazillion years, and it was something of a disappointment. I just wanted to do that first adventure, D&D basic, go down into the dungeon, and find some evil druids in the last room. Instead, we wandered around a town in the Forgotten Realms for a while, worried about boring minutiae ("What colour do you want the stitching in your robes to be?"), and in general had a boring old time.
Now, I have a sample size of one, so I don't know if this is just a case of a DM with very different ideas of what should go on in a game of D&D or what, but it seems to me that RPGs aren't what they once were. When I go to local game stores, I just can't find much that captures what they were like back in the day. Is there something out there for people like me, looking for a more old-school kind of game outside of an MMORPG?
RPGs seem to have become way too bloody serious. I just want to kill some kobolds.
I'm not a hardware guy here, but I just saw something somewhere else that had me wondering - Macs do their audio processing on the CPU, if I'm not mistaken. Windows boxen don't. If I get my Windows games to play on my dual-booting Mactel, will the audio work? Does anyone know if Windows does its audio processing in the CPU if it doesn't have the requisite hardware available? Or will I have games with awesome graphics and crappy-to-nonexistent audio?
You might be interested in this for a different take on bloatware. Software requirements haven't gone up as quickly as hardware specs, at least as Joel proves through the power of anecdote. Those resources are there for a reason. It's not bad to use them.
Indeed. To mark the OP a troll is to suggest the question isn't worth asking. It is, it's a valid quesiton, and it turns out science has a good answer, a much better one than creationism has. We on the science side of the debate won't win in people's hearts and mind if we just mark people trolls and refuse to respond to them.
Slashdot Mirror
- Why does Swift have both a "var" keyword and a "let" keyword? One should be sufficient with the other being a default behavior. If a symbol is not declared "var" then just assume it is constant or visa versa. Furthermore, it may not be necessary to have either of the key words because (I think) in every case, the need for variability and mutation should be determinable by the compiler. Type is already being inferred by the compiler, and mutability could reasonably be considered an aspect of type.
Well, for one reason, so that you'll catch typeos in variable names at compile time. You have to explicitly declare the symbols you're going to use.
People do amazing things when they feel like the thing they're creating is an extension of themselves. Far more than any engineering process or philosophy I've seen, the best work I've seen in my career is from people who identify strongly with their work.
Reminds me of the only anti-drug ad that ever really resonated with me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy_knXF_G6c
Go into drama. You'll spend lots of time interacting directly with women, and if you get the right material, possibly fooling around with them. All for the sake of art, of course.
Damn, his science is too tight!
Please. http://bennyhillifier.com/?id=1DoWdHOtlrk
The Farnsworth Paradox
Actually, it's The Farnsworth Parabox. It had boxes! And a PAIR of them! HA! And then there were more than two boxes, but let's forget about that for the moment.
>Also, god damn it's hard to find a pair of regular, black, work-appropriate shoes that don't have 4 inch heels or are ugly as sin. Few things infuriate me more than shoe shopping.
>/female
That would've been so much more awesome if you were a dude.
I think I'll buy two copies of D3, just to make up for it. Ain't I a rapscallion?
Actually, that's only one kind of ad. There are a bunch of different basic types, not all of which attempt to work on subconscious associations. Check it out: http://www.slate.com/id/2170872/nav/tap1/
And you don't use markers on your system, either? (I'm not trying to troll here, just curious at this point)
Actually it can be creative animation. The difference is that the animation is being done by the actor, rather than someone sitting at a desk (although there's probably someone doing some cleanup work).
If it's so bloody trivial, where's the version of the software you wrote?
Ahem.
'Nuff said.
> Don't judge groups of people; judge individuals. Personally, I'd go with "Don't judge people's beliefs; judge people's actions."
Don Norman argues that Google isn't simple at all. Sure, searching with it is, but Google does way more than search - and if you're not looking to search, you're going to have difficulty finding things. It's all argued here: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/the_truth_about.html
It's currently sitting at 25% on the Tomatometer. The 'Cream of the Crop' give it no good reviews. But your statement may be right - it may still be better than most of the videogame movies that have been made.
These movies are garbage. The basic story in pretty much any videogame wouldn't be up to the standards of a highschool creative writing class. There's never anything interesting there to work with - at least, nothing that hasn't been done better in a hundred low-budget sci-fi, fantasy or horror flicks.
The fact that there's a generation growing up thinking that these are decent (or even 'decent enough') movies is a sad state of affairs, and it doesn't bode well at all for what we'll see coming down the pipes a decade or two hence.
It's because of that kind of talk I've stopped looking at jobs in the game industry. I just can't see how every time a game is made, especially when so many of them are so similar, each problem is something new that hasn't been done before, and the whole thing is some huge creative endeavour. I'm sure that's part of it, and hopefully each game has something new and cool, but still - most of the code is, or at least should be, well-maintained, well-written, mature, and stable.
It should be engineered in such a way that adding new functionality doesn't mean starting from scratch or digging deep into the code and changing things at the lowest level, but rather it should mean working with a well-designed interface. There should be good test coverage, and you should be able to drop features from the product if you have to make a deadline, since that's better than half-implemented features that don't work or aren't tested.
I recently had a job interview with a game company, and had a list of questions about their engineering practices. After getting the pitch from the president, who talked about the hours they worked for the last title they shipped, and how they really really didn't want that to happen again - but he still said there'd be long hours - I knew that it would indeed happen again, and there was no point asking my questions since it was clear that the answer to a significant number would be "no."
I understand that there are things that make games different from other types of software, but good engineering is good engineering, and it should be adopted by the industry. That almost every algorithm is mostly R&D rings false to me, since most games sure don't feel like there's much new in them.
If there's something that the game completely depends on, and no-one knows how to do it, then don't greenlight the game. Figure out how to do that critical thing first, get it working, and then invest in the game. That's how things are done in the rest of the software industry, and it's a very good thing: it means as cool as an idea sounds, if it can't be done, you don't want to waste a lot of money on it. Lots of new features in lots of software is almost all R&D, but it doesn't mean the product can't be scheduled or that gobs of money should be wasted on something that might not go anywhere no matter how cool it would be if it worked. How much better would Oblivion be, to take a random example, if they realised early on that the AI sucked and they needed to take a different approach, and designed around that? Instead you can burn someone's house down as they happily tell you plot points in the story (or so I've heard - haven't played it myself).
I don't doubt that there are elements of game design which are very difficult to schedule. But to say the whole game is like that sounds like a cop-out.
I'm a largely self-taught programmer (I have a pure mathematics background - no programming required!) currently working at a top software company. I got here largely because of the initiative I showed working on personal projects. So I think the best thing to do for you would be to pick a project you find interesting, and implement it at home. Having something solid you can point to and say, "I did that," can be pretty persuasive.
A few links you might be interested in:
How To Become A Hacker
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Hope this helps!
I once met a girl whose father was an important VP at Pepsi. And man, was she serious about her Pepsi. She told me about how Coke was doing all these underhanded things to keep Pepsi in their place, how Pepsi deserves to be at the top, and I doubt she's ever tried Coke in her life*. It was kind of scary - this was really, really important stuff to her. About sugar water.
So I have no trouble seeing the kids of the head of Microsoft being anti anything-not-by-MS. When you pick up your parents' religion as a child, it's not just the organized kind.
*Well, okay, she did plenty of coke. Just not the drinkable kind.
Now, I have a sample size of one, so I don't know if this is just a case of a DM with very different ideas of what should go on in a game of D&D or what, but it seems to me that RPGs aren't what they once were. When I go to local game stores, I just can't find much that captures what they were like back in the day. Is there something out there for people like me, looking for a more old-school kind of game outside of an MMORPG?
RPGs seem to have become way too bloody serious. I just want to kill some kobolds.
I'm not a hardware guy here, but I just saw something somewhere else that had me wondering - Macs do their audio processing on the CPU, if I'm not mistaken. Windows boxen don't. If I get my Windows games to play on my dual-booting Mactel, will the audio work? Does anyone know if Windows does its audio processing in the CPU if it doesn't have the requisite hardware available? Or will I have games with awesome graphics and crappy-to-nonexistent audio?
You might be interested in this for a different take on bloatware. Software requirements haven't gone up as quickly as hardware specs, at least as Joel proves through the power of anecdote. Those resources are there for a reason. It's not bad to use them.
Indeed. To mark the OP a troll is to suggest the question isn't worth asking. It is, it's a valid quesiton, and it turns out science has a good answer, a much better one than creationism has. We on the science side of the debate won't win in people's hearts and mind if we just mark people trolls and refuse to respond to them.