A programmer’s paranoia

Everytime I choose to learn something I never think about how much the process will last as well as I never surrender even if I discover, on the middle of the learning curve, that what I’m studying isn’t so useful.

We, computer games programmers, lives in a world in which the base ideas are always the same but the access to that ideas changes a lot. That’s pretty strange indeed. All that could be written about computer science has been written in D. E. Knuth. The Art of Computer Programming 1/2/3. Now it’s only a matter of build layers over layers in order to simplify the production, the testing and the building of software infrastructures. But do these new technologies simplify our everyday work? Well I think that it isn’t always true.

We can access to a world full of candies and joy in which there’s a garbage collector that help those poor programmers that aren’t skilled enough to write N constructor followed by… N destructors. We can write secure and stable applications that work on those new environment build over those beautiful patterns of Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides. But it’s not the right road to take.

The new graduated programmers arising from our times will never understand what are the real problems related to programming. If newcomers do not understand what lie behind their code we will have more and more useless, fat and expensive programs in our machines. Take a look at new AAA+ games. Disassemble the executables and start laughing when you see singletons and other fancy so-called “design-patterns”. Well laugh if you share my opinion: “c/crt and somewhat c++/stl (at least obj)” for everyday applications. All other languages for scripting purpose.

Happy coding.