Hacker News Reader

Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

I think because - or to speak for myself, the reason I've never bought/played it, despite being interested - it's similar and yet not productive.

Versus say Call of Duty or whatever that you might lose yourself in, which is also not productive, but bears no resemblance to work.

Pilot communities probably say similar things about flight sims (or flight components of games) that aren't good enough to be useful practice?

View on HN

I’m a pilot and lost interest completely in flight sims when I bought my airplane (And I had a maxed out setup, multiple monitors, VR, controls, etc.) The simulator doesn’t capture the real-ness as ironic as that is, of the sounds, smells, vibrations, emotions and so on. In fact during my flight training my experience with simulators imparted a few low-level bad habits I had to work through when it came to operating the controls.

The analog controls in real life are heavier, more raw, somewhat imprecise, and you can feel them knocked around by the wind for example. Night and day difference. It honestly makes the most state of the art simulator feel like you’re operating a NES.

> In fact during my flight training my experience with simulators imparted a few low-level bad habits I had to work through when it came to operating the controls.

When I first started flying my instructor specifically recommended against flight sims for that very reason.

Now that I have my PPL I only use them to practice approaches for new airports that I’ve never visited before and to familiarize myself with the cockpit layout for planes I haven’t flown before. It helps build some minor muscle memory so I can focus on the harder parts of flying.

It’s not in any way similar to coding, though - it’s a puzzle-solving game. It’s not made to simulate any engineering discipline, nor user to train engineers (like flight sims are)

You don't find coding similar to solving puzzles in any way?

IMO coding is to solving puzzle the same way as any other discipline (from people management to architecture) is to solving puzzles

Not really.

And I think that's mostly due to the lack of constraints in most programming jobs. I don't have to think about throughput or optimizing op codes or almost anything else because our machines have absurd amounts of compute and more memory than most hard drives I've had in my life, the networks are broad and fast, and there's a commercial solution for most of the hard problems.

Maybe I'd think differently if I worked on microcontrollers, but my brief foray into Arduinos and Raspberry Pies didn't feel that much different. I mean, I was using Python on the Arduino. I felt more constrained by the pins than anything else - another problem with several well explored solutions.

Not at all.

I’ve hated puzzle games all my life. Most likely because they’re artificial.

Many people are quoted in the article claiming it is in fact useful for training/educating software engineers.

People say the same thing about Sudoku. Or any video game (historically claimed as a hobby that creates coders, just because many coders liked computers at an early age, I suspect)

Liking video games sometimes leads to modding video games, and modding video games is a gateway drug for "real" programming.

Yes, factorio is not coding, though it follows some principle of programming, such as input-process-output, workflow, load balancers, modular design, etc. Many players say that the factories often resembles PCB.

but that's the extend of it, you don't have to do heavier programming practice like algorithm, complex state management, input parsing and validation (unless sushi), or anything involving combinators until finishing the 1.0 version.

What about Zachtronics games like TIS-100 and Shenzhen/IO and Exapunks that are literally about coding (albeit in a simplified assembly language).

Factorio is not a puzzle game. You can get puzzle like gameplay if, for example, you are on a map with heavily restricted space, or are trying to micro-optimize something. But that is analogouse to code-golf or microoptimizations in programming, which are fairly puzzle like.

For typical gameplay, the only puzzles you run into are the ones you build yourself into. The name of game is to design your factory in a modular and extensible way so that you do not build yourself into a puzzle.

"not in any way similar to coding" is a very strong statement

many people feel it feels similar to coding, in the way you have to slowly refactor designs + work involves a recursive breakdown of tasks + tracing/debugging of issues

I can think of a bunch of similarities just off the top of my head: throughput management is probably the most critical skill in factorio, and obviously comes up all over software engineering. Managing production belt chains is not unlike managing your program's call stack. Ensuring the right resource reaches a production facility is like managing input types.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com