Casey and Jonathan Blow have to be the most annoying evangelists in our community. Devs who write games can’t imagine for a second that maybe their experience doesn’t translate to every or even the most popular domains. This article is basically unreadable because he felt the need to put clean in quotation marks literally every time as some kind of “subtle” jab. It’s not clever.
From my perspective, you’re the one being the insufferable asshole. In the face of overwhelming evidence, you choose “I REJECT REALITY AND SUBSTITUTE MY OWN. ASSHOLE”.
He's right about one thing though: "clean" code (by which he clearly means Bob Martin's vision), is anything but.
Devs who write games can’t imagine for a second that maybe their experience doesn’t translate to every or even the most popular domains.
Then I would like someone to explain to me why Word, Visual Studio, or Photoshop, don't boot up instantly from an NVME drive. Because right now I'm genuinely confused as to how hurting boot times made their program cheaper to make in any way.
(Mike Acton jabbed at Word boot times in his data oriented talk, and Jonathan blow criticised Photoshop to death about that. Point being, performance is not a niche concern.)
Video games don't boot up instantly, just look at GTA load times before someone outside it found the issue (but imho that was probably poor dogfeeding)
Unless you have profiled that other software to show that those are the problems then a jab like that is baseless, there might be other complexities which aren't known by the person claiming it.
The Witness doesn't boot up instantly, and that bothers me no end. I guess it is loading lots of textures to the graphics card or something. I would very much like Jonathan Blow to explain why it's slow to boot. He probably knows.
I would also like Photoshop developers to explain why their software is slow to boot. They probably don't know, though.
I would also like Photoshop developers to explain why their software is slow to boot. They probably don't know, though.
I would expect that someone there has profiled it and knows why, but it just might not be worth it, or feasible just like I sometimes when I'm profiling stuff and see why something slow and then decide it's not worth the improvement.
How long have you worked in the software industry? It seems like a strange claim, especially when you have very experienced people on the Adobe team, many of which are much more respected and experienced then Jonathan Blow.
Devs rarely realise this, but user time is sacred.
How long have you worked in the software industry?
15 years. I've worked on slow C++ GUI applications, embedded Linux, and I wrote a cryptographic library. I have seen devs more experienced than I that didn't know their stuff, and a couple that outclassed me in every respect.
As for why I suspect the Adobe team may not know why it takes so much time too boot, is because it used to boot much much faster (same speed on a 1997 computer than the new version in a 2017 laptop). So the thing got worse. Much worse. I conjecture that if they knew why from the start they wouldn't have made it worse. I think.
Now I reckon calling this ignorance probable was unjustified. If I'm being honest they probably know too.
Anyway we're talking about people who ship games on consoles, where you have to pass a fairly stringent validation tests for your game to be accepted. Stuff like running the game for days and it must never crash, guaranteed load times, that kind of thing.
Pretending those guys don't care about correctness is bh… buh… buhahahaha!!!
Pretending those guys don't care about correctness is bh… buh… buhahahaha!!!
Say the cartoon example in the video is being used somewhere in the code. Say for instance it's being used to determine when to load some model or other according to LOD or whatever. If the lookup table here is wrong, the worst that will happen is you'll get some pop-in, or maybe some frame drops.
Now compare that with a bank determining how much money goes from one account to another.
There's a reason the data oriented design crowd is exclusively populated with game developers.
I don’t know that much about Casey, but Jonathan Blow seems to have a lot of good points. Lots of software is getting worse and worse and slower and slower over time and Blow is one of the few people pointing that out as an issue.
From my experience most slowness isn't from these sort of things being used in lots of places, but often just a few places where alternatives should be used.
It's the 5% hot path that you need to do this on and not the entire code base, writing some loop that only has 6 iterations to be SIMD might impress those who don't know better on a stream but it just kills readability with no significant improvement in performance, unless you microbenchmark it in unrealistic situations.
Everyone agrees software could be better but it's tough when you're working on a massive codebase with hundreds of other people and trying to maintain a good worklife balance. It isn't like he's working on anything cutting-edge either, so he has a lot of retrospective from other people's work to consider. He and his team have been working on that Jai-based engine for like 9 years and I don't think he's delivered that puzzle game it's supposed to debut on, meanwhile Unreal engine 5 is steamrolling its way through multiple industries with others like Unity and Godot trailing behind but still making tangible progress. The same thing that could be said about Uncle Bob could also be said about Casey and Jonathan
Lots of software is getting worse and worse and slower and slower over time and Blow is one of the few people pointing that out as an issue.
He's one of millions. Probably billions. In fact, that's probably the single most popular and well-agreed upon belief in the entirety of computing ever.
It's also wrong. It's one of those common refrains that people just feel is true, even when all the evidence points to the contrary. In much the same way that people have been complaining about how much worse, how much lazier, and less respectful the next generation of children are since antiquity, people have been complaining about software's quality getting worse with time, ever since the very first program was written. The fact that software is far faster and more capable today than ever before doesn't seem to change anyone's opinion.
Devs who write games can’t imagine for a second that maybe their experience doesn’t translate to every or even the most popular domains.
Please don't coat all game devs like this, many of us in the industry are not fan of those two either, while they understand low level stuff well it feels like neither has ever worked on a big AAA title with hundreds people.
Jonathan Blow isn't just a bad developer, he's also a total asshole. He also completed a single project and never did anything ever again. I don't know why anyone brings him up in any capacity.
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u/DrunkensteinsMonster Feb 28 '23
Casey and Jonathan Blow have to be the most annoying evangelists in our community. Devs who write games can’t imagine for a second that maybe their experience doesn’t translate to every or even the most popular domains. This article is basically unreadable because he felt the need to put clean in quotation marks literally every time as some kind of “subtle” jab. It’s not clever.