Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

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Exactly. The problems of software performance come from decades of poorly/quickly executed evolutionary change resulting in bad systems design. It's all an new abstraction over an older abstraction over an even older abstraction, because some old application still needs to be supported (something Casey has likely never had the problem of worrying about in game development).

Game developers have the luxury of starting from near-scratch every once in a while. That exactly what his lauded handmade series is all about. I'm guessing that things wouldn't be so clear-cut if he was given a 10 year old codebase to iterate on.

"Normal" developers see game developers as gods walking amongst us and place far more value on their opinions than they should. The truth is that game developers and "normal" developers face equally as challenging problems, just different problems. As a trivial example, an experienced web developer could probably run circles around Casey in terms of elegantly accounting for browser quirks (conversely, the web developer would probably be stumped about data oriented design). Either could learn the other's discipline, but each would have decades head-start on the other.

The idolization of gamedevs is extremely frustrating, especially when it comes to appeals to their authority.

Even more annoying than the idolization of game devs is when you open up the "Displays" submenu of the osx system preferences application, and it takes several times longer to load than the previous major os version, several seconds!, with the only significant change being a different layout, and constantly trying to ignore how nearly everything takes so much longer than necessary, wasting so much time and energy.

I agree that not everything is like a game, but it makes me legitimately sad when it seems like nobody cares about performance (aside from a few domains).

I am a developer who worked on embedded, desktop apps, mobile apps, games and now on large microservice based application. A developer is a developer and can move from one kind of application to another.

I find what Casey says in his videos to be true. And I though about that stuff before I even watched his videos, which are excellent.

However, I started not to care. I don't want to start fights inside the company, especially fighting alone against many OOP cultists. There's not my money at stake, so if companies as a whole decide for OOP, clean code, SOLID, design patterns, abstractions on top of abstractions, making the code bases giant pile of junks while degrading performance, I am not going to go against the crowd.

Code that I write for myself is quite different than code I write for my employers.

I just hope that the industry as a whole will wake up from the whole OOP nightmare.

> I just hope that the industry as a whole will wake up from the whole OOP nightmare.

I agree with that 100%. OOP is a giant mess, no matter where your stance on code clarity or performance stands. It's objectively worse in both regards.

> something Casey has likely never had the problem of worrying about in game development.

This is simply not true, and has in all likelihood worked on such problems given his work at RAD whose software has been used in +20 years at this point.

> The problems of software performance come from decades of poorly/quickly executed evolutionary change resulting in bad systems design.

This may be true of some code bases, but it's demonstrably false for new software that's created today. Lots of new software gets built and it's slow.

> The idolization of gamedevs is extremely frustrating

Every story needs a Hero; it's inspiring when you're trapped in the CRUD gulag (until you see the TC/WLB).

Fair enough, but never forget that you can be your own hero. I have heard numerous accounts of hobby coding being used as a successful antidote to chore coding.

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