[gameprogrammer] Re: [OT] Re: General Purpose Double Linked List Class

On Thursday 02 March 2006 22:03, Fernando Arturo Gomez Flores wrote:
[...]
> >The most striking thing is how totally different a background your 
> >average beginning programmer comes from these days. And, I'm having 
> >trouble getting my head around how your average programmer these
> >days  
> >can get away with no experience of programming to the metal, no 
> >knowledge of asm, and a very limited understanding of integer and 
> >logic algebra. (Actually, they can't sometimes. They call for me
> >when  
> >they need some trivial bit shuffling code figured out...) 
> 
> That's why in my country mathematicians -like myself- are taking
> jobs as programmers, and they are well paid, even better, than
> regular programmers, since they seem to have a larger background...

Kinda' makes sense, really. I mean, most real programs need to do a 
lot of calculations of various kinds - and if you can't do the math 
manually, how are you going to make the computer do it? :-)


> >Those were 
> >the very fundamentals of programming in the environments I started 
> >out in.
> >
> 
> I think that everyone should learn all that stuff you mentioned
> early. I had to grab a book of assembler, and learn it by my own,
> just to try to achieve the background... and it is hard when there
> actually is no point nowadays on learning such stuff, beyond the
> background and saying to collegues: "ah, I know assemly language for
> x86..."

Well, I've used x86 asm at work every now and then over the last few 
years (though mostly because of compiler bugs I had to work around... 
Never going to rely on closed source tools again!), and I do 
to-the-metal programming on a daily basis. (Linux, RTAI, custom 
hardware.) Just fiddling with an RTAI kernel driver as we speak, 
actually.

(And I deal with VM "asm" code a bit when I mess around with my 
scripting engine, EEL - but that's really rather high level stuff, 
compared to normal asm.)

However, as far as "normal" application programming is concerned, it 
does indeed seem like you can get away with visual GUI building and 
naive, brute force techniques to great extent these days. Game 
programming is probably a lot closer to what I do (control 
engineering on embedded systems), as at least there are serious 
performance requirements that automatically weed out the most crude 
kludges.


> >And it still feels like yesterday, that I was hacking an object 
> >oriented GUI toolkit in pure 68k asm - and that was like 18 years 
> >ago. Why this weird (or rather, missing) sense of time when it
> >comes to these things?
> 
> "Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end..."

What?

*wakes up*

You mean those days are over...?

Who cares!? :-D (Goes back to messing with drivers and custom 
hardware.)


> >Ok, what has this got to do with anything!? Back to work! :-D
> 
> In the end, you didn't told us your age :P

Well, no one asked about *my* age, actually...! ;-)

Anyway, I'm 31.

(First "computer": Sharp PC-1430 at the age of 10. No games or 
anything; just BASIC and a tiny alphanumeric LCD. So, I guess plain 
programming in it's own right is what got me hooked. :-)


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

.-------  http://olofson.net - Games, SDL examples  -------.
|        http://zeespace.net - 2.5D rendering engine       |
|       http://audiality.org - Music/audio engine          |
|     http://eel.olofson.net - Real time scripting         |
'--  http://www.reologica.se - Rheology instrumentation  --'


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