How so? I've always found C# docs to be quite a bit better than the equivalent Sun/Oracle's Java docs. Language features like auto-property/fields, Lamda expressions, LINQ, etc have been sorely missed in Java (at least by me) until recently. Admittedly, the C# frameworks are a bit lacking compared to the Java ecosystem though. I will admit that I've had to get back into Java recently for my job and after starting to use IntelliJ, it's actually made Java mor enjoyable.

My programming started with BASIC on an IBM XT back in the 80s and various programming books, mainly just copying the programs as written then trying to modify them. This book in particular was pivotal for me as I loved the old Infocom text adventures of the time:

Write Your Own Adventure Programs For Your Microcomputer:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxv0SsvibDMTYkFJbUswOHFQclE/view

(It looks like these books were released for free by Usborne: https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-coding-books/ ... what a nostalgia trip!)

In high-school I learned C and LISP for Autocad programming. I continued to learn about C (plus a little C++) and ASM thanks to John Carmack and DOOM/Quake. Wrote my own computer games (mainly RTS as the Command and Conquer series was big back then) ... nothing great but I thought they were cool.

Dabbled in Java a bit in college but ultimately shifted to C++ and C# after getting a consultancy job and that is what I continued with until recently. Now I'm back into Java and currently trying to catch up on all the front-end Javascript libraries now as well as tinkering with Perl, GO, and Objective-C.

I have a very hard time believing thresh invented/mainstreamed WASD.

First, well before quake there were games that required mouselook, probably most notably descent and xwing type games. (Joysticks were expensive, uncommon peripherals for the most part). I clearly remember playing both of those games with a keyboard / mouse setup like today, and that feels like it was around 2 years prior to quake's release.

Second, as a diehard quake junkie who practically camped outside the store to get my hands on the game, from the very beginning there were many sites dedicated to qtest (the beta), and the very first thing those pages trafficked were cfg files from all the people arguing which control method was best. (then came skins, maps, quakeworld, mods, machinima, etc). I would say WASD was pretty well established well before Thresh won his ferrari- I dont have any statistical data or anything, and I think its cool that carmack included his .cfg file in later releases, but I highly doubt he was the first to use it / that people used it because they wanted to imitate him.

I agree that a disturbed person with more power is a bigger problem. To go straight for the Godwin's Law example, there have probably been people more evil and messed up than Hitler in the history of Earth, but very few had the power and opportunity to act on that evil to the magnitude he did.

However, you brought up magnitude of problems and compared the two as "equally disturbed". The Republican Congressman (with admittedly more power/influence) "body-slammed" a reporter. The Democrat nutcase shot up 6 people and (I think) didn't manage to kill any of them, but not for lack of trying.

We don't really know what was going on in either persons' heads when they did these things. What led up to them, etc. Maybe the reporter had been doggedly following and questioning/harassing the Congressman to such an extent that he snapped. Happens quite a lot with paparazzi, and we tend to give the celebrity targets a lot of benefit of the doubt in those cases. The only long-term result of the bodyslam incident that I know of is that the reporter's glasses were broken. Glasses can be repaired or replaced. Bullet wounds are rather tougher to fix.

However my main point isn't to get into a dick-measuring contest about who did more harm or who is more fucked up. My point is that the person entirely responsible in either incident is known. GOP Congressman physically assaulted a reporter of his own volition. Democrat nutcase shot up that baseball practice of his own volition. Those individuals are 100% responsible for what they did, no matter who or what they might claim drove them to their actions. Just like it isn't Ozzy Osbourne's fault when some nutter offs themselves after listening to his song "Suicide Solution", or John Carmack's fault for Columbine even though Klebold and Harris liked playing Doom.

I understand where you're coming from, but I stand by my previous posts.

Full disclosure, I never got professionally employed as a programmer / coder / software engineer. However, my Bachelors Degree was in CS, and I have many friends working in the field.

In the show Silicon Valley, Richard Hendriks is working for a large corporate entity but has an idea / personal project that he ends up spinning into a new company. He is trained as a software engineer (CS), NOT with any business or management background (MIS), yet he becomes sort of the de-facto boss / CEO (at least early in the show). He hires a small team to help him develop his product.

Given that scenario, I think the show portrays things very accurately or at least completely plausibly. He's a coder, not a manager. Programmers may understand the importance of formatting and style standards, but at least tend to not have the correct personality type to be comfortable with formally dictating those standards to a team (an activity which would generally be more in line with an MIS background).

Also, his company is small -- just a few other programmers. They are all specializing on different components of the product. So they generally aren't working on each other's code. Standards for function arguments / helper functions / etc. would have to be agreed upon to get their individual components to interact, but that is a separate issue from tabs vs spaces. It would be wise to set a style and naming convention standard and have everyone conform to it, I agree completely. But Richard isn't built for the manager / CEO position, so he either fails to recognize that or doesn't feel comfortable dictating standards to his team.

One more thing to consider is that he (Richard) essentially is the product. He's the keystone piece, the central figure. He's John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, or Steve Wozniak. Even in a very large team / corporate environment, I'd wager that more often than not the style standards that end up getting set tend to fall in line with whatever those key guys want them to be. Don't touch an id Software graphics engine without conforming to Carmack's way, or the Linux kernel without conforming to Torvald's standards. Especially if they are building something new from scratch -- which is again true in the Silicon Valley show scenario.

The show isn't a documentary on how to properly run a startup company in the real Silicon Valley, but it is generally accurate enough that it has a lot of nuances that people with a programming background can pick up on and be entertained by (even people that don't actually work professionally in the field like me). And more important, the general feel of the show can be entertaining even for people that know absolutely nothing about programming.

From memory, the developers openly admitted Brutal Doom was a huge influence on this game.

Sidenote: I have kind of a hard time calling this an id game, it's really more of a Bethesda game. No Carmack (John or Adrian), no Romero, Tom Hall.... there isn't really anyone left who worked on the original Doom (except Kevin Cloud).

Still heaps of fun though (the campaign anyway, not really bothered about the multi)

"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
- John Carmack (lead programmer on the original Doom)

Story in a game can be great. But sometimes, you need just enough story to provide a reason to shotgun demons in the face.

It took quite a bit of technical wizardry on Carmack's part to get scrolling worlds to work on PC architecture at the time.
I'm glad this was rejected, as Doom may never have been made had id gone on to develop PC ports for Nintendo.

Yes, actually John Carmack noted that back during the release of Doom 3 it was possible to load the entire game as one chunk if you had ~4gb of RAM, but back then that amount of RAM wasn't as common as it is today.
Unfortunately, crap OS design today pretty much guarantees most resources in a PC just go to running broke-ass Windows.

Yes, but if even John Carmack admitted that programming a VCR was too complicated for him, we might as well consider that this kind of feature was not available to the layman. :-)

Carmack doesn't need an ego stroke because he's fucking Carmack. I believe these legends of brutality are just stating the truth -- and ALL the other humans are jealous. <3

Watched the whole thing.... Carmack is God

>> ^thegrimsleeper:

Three and a half hours?! Jeez. Is the video necessary and if not is it possible to find the audio somewhere online?


You can download an mp3 of the video audio: snipMP3

Or download the video and just play it minimized, so in the event that it sounds like the video is necessary, you can still see what's going on: Keepvid

There's also a Greasemonkey script that adds an audio/video download button to Youtube pages: Youtube Center. Great for stuff like this which I wouldn't trust my browser to not crash right in the middle of.

John Carmack, Michael Abrash and Palmer Luckey (Founder of Oculus) talk about VR and AR:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gaqQdyfAz8

>> ^shuac:

Yeah, because Carmack never made a mistake. <cough>Doom 3<cough>Rage<cough>
>> ^Deano:
Isn't Carmack the guy to take note of? Apparently to impress him you have to be doing something right.



Carmack is a technology wizard. He's all about the engine, and I'm not sure there's anyone in the games industry right now who has anywhere near the same knack for the technical side of development.

Carmack didn't make any mistake with Rage, because he's not the game designer, he developed the game engine, and did a hell of a job.