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Comment by random314 | Hacker News Reader

Yet another Carmack worship story. He is a great engineer, but let's not overhype this.

It started with the legendary square root function. Which lost its legendary status once it turned out Carmack wasn't the author.

Now it is about standard BSP technique from Computer graphics text books from that era.

There is also hype about Carmack solving AGI by 2030, when he is yet to publish a single widely cited AI paper.

EDIT:

I am guilty of reading the first couple of paragraphs and assuming this was Carmack worship. My bad! Leaving the original comment, mostly as is.

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As someone working at the same time as him on similar problems, I honestly and sincerely disagree. At the time my reaction was "this is space cadet stuff". 486 hardware was really slow, and the idea of doing any kind of real computational geometry back then was incredibly far-fetched. Until he showed it wasn't.

Carmack is a great programmer because he consistently produces solid, fast code, not because he has groundbreaking ideas.

It's similar with Linus. He didn't invented monolithic kernels, UNIX, distributed version control. He "just" wrote good implementations.

Turns out brilliant ideas are overrated in programming, what matters is execution and daily grind.

> Turns out brilliant ideas are overrated in programming, what matters is execution and daily grind.

You also have to be good at finding the brilliant ideas that are worth using.

You need to understand the problem, understand what you're trying to do, and understand how this abstract solution maps to your problem.

Then you have to implement it.

Let's not underhype it, either: It seems you are underestimating the impact that Doom had on PC gaming when it came out. Using BSP trees to perform zero overdraw rendering definitely was not something that had been done before on consumer level hardware and it can definitely be argued that applying them this way for Doom was a stroke of genius.

You're setting the bar for "genius" too low, which unfortunately is commonplace in computer programming. If you take something that already exists and apply it to your code I don't call it genius. Hi quality programming, yes, but genius no.

I didn't realise I was not allowed to set my own bars, though :)

Rather than argue about the definition of a word, I'd rather ask what examples of real genius in programming that you can offer.

Fabrice Bellard

FWIW, the inverse square root function wasn't popularized by Carmack. Most people shared it because they were amused by the confused comments surrounding it, and how it demonstrated an extremely vertical slice of optimization.

Treating anyone like a rockstar is a bad idea, but Carmacks and Wozniaks deserve the praise more than the Zuckerbergs and Jobs' out there.

From the Carmack worship story: “So Carmack was not the first person to think of using BSP trees in a real-time graphics simulation. Of course, it’s one thing to anticipate that BSP trees might be used this way and another thing to actually do it. But even in the implementation Carmack may have had more guidance than is commonly assumed.”

I am guilty of reading the first couple of paragraphs and assuming this was Carmack worship. My bad!

Honey for the poison.

The story of tracing the magic number back is really fun and it's interesting to see how the trade of computer graphics programming was passed down from one company to another. I don't think it's legendary status was at all diminished when it turns out not to have been Carmack's invention.

https://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

https://web.archive.org/web/20120920120948/http://blog.quent...

Yeah, I don't think we read the same article. This isn't a Carmack worship article.

What do you mean not worship Jiu-Jitsu practicioner, Luddite Nemesis, Jace Hall asphyxiatior, and master of the Anti-Life equation - John Carmack?

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