One of the bigger revelations I had first learning to program was based around a confusing thing I’d wondered about the very first time I saw a 3D video game, Super Mario 64. Up to that point my young brain could have imagined how a 2D game could be programmed, naively thinking they had just coded up every possible game state. But the sheer number of permutations in the 3D, open world plane immediately made me realize that was impossible to do because of the sheer number of permutations - so I concluded something else must have been afoot, but it was all mystical to me.
Anyway I was struggling bad with programming concepts very early on and tried to make an interactive multiplayer text adventure game in the same exact way as this book, struggled mightily, until one day I realized some of it could be done algorithmically rather than encoding every possible permutation into the game - and it clicked. A very vivid and surreal moment for me that I’ll never forget. As we age and get more senior, we forget little sparks like that sometimes I think. Thanks for posting this