Getting Started with Swift on Windows

> [T]he black triangle was a pioneer. It wasn’t just that we’d managed to get a triangle onto the screen. That could be done in about a day. It was the journey the triangle had taken to get up on the screen. It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit (though there were no lights, so the triangle came out looking black). The black triangle demonstrated that the foundation was finally complete the core of a fairly complex system was completed, and we were now ready to put it to work doing cool stuff. By the end of the day, we had complete models on the screen, manipulating them with the controllers. Within a week, we had an environment to move the model through.

[0] http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745

Of course it starts with hello world - but it shouldn't take a manual of byzantine scripts and dependencies to do it. This reeks of 'constant problems' in the platform - and this is before having to deal with Swift, which is a cool but fairly complex language - all before you can even focus on the problem one is trying to solve!

I think sometimes we nerds lose sight of the fact that we're trying to build stuff. Sometimes I think we equate complexity with intelligence, or see some noble value in doing hard things. When I think we should consider ourselves more like carpenters, building things. It's not science, it's just building decks - we want tools that work.

Anyhow, it's no slag on the author, it's pretty cool for him or her to have done this. My beef is with the nature of the complexity.

I came to the conclusion that I experience all these things to varying degrees when the world does not conform to my mental model of how I want/expect it to be.

That's what it says.