T w e n t y S i d e d

One of Jon Blow’s original goals for Jai was to embrace (or perhaps restore) the “joy of programming”. I thought that while we’re waiting for Jai to come out, we could look at this idea and see what it might suggest about future languages.

“Joy of programming” is a pretty nebulous concept, but I interpret it as a desire for an overall reduction in friction and hassle. Not only do friction and hassle eat precious hours you could spend being productive, but they also drain your morale. There’s nothing worse than sitting down at your computer and realizing you’ve got a full day of soul-sucking busywork in front of you. Sure, lots of programming jobs feature this sort of vexation. The thing is, those jobs tend to pay a lot better. If you’re working in games programming then you’re probably making some sort of financial sacrifice in the name of having a “fun” job. If the job isn’t fun, you might as well ditch games and go make productivity software for more money in a city with a lower cost of living.

Things That Are Not Programming

Just about every job has some sort of support tasks associated with it. You need to clean the kitchen and wash dishes in order to cook foodI guess you could hire someone else to do it, but it still needs to be done., but doing dishes is not cooking. Dishwashing might be part of your job as a cook, but it’s not the point of the job. You don’t cook food because you want to wash dishes, you wash dishes because you want to cook food.

Cleaning your brushes is not painting. Stringing and tuning your guitar is not playing music. Checking spelling and formatting text is not writing a novel. Updating WordPress and sorting out CSS problems is not writing a blog. Putting gas in your car is not delivering pizzas. Those ancillary tasks need to be done and a few people might even enjoy doing them, but they don’t pay the bills. They just enable you to do the thing that does pay the bills. If you can reduce how much of your time is spent on these ancillary tasks, it will be a net win. 

I’ll admit that sometimes the line can get really blurry. An artist working on commission might have the following workflow:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Programming Vexations Part 5: The Vexations Begin”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Languages are usually described in terms of being “high level” or “low level”. This is usually presented as a tradeoff, and as a programmer you’re obliged to pick your poison.

High vs. Low Level Programming

If you’re not a programmer, then I need to make it clear that these two concepts are probably the opposite of what you’d expect. A high-level language sounds like something for advanced programmers, and a low-level language sounds like something for beginners. But in classic engineer thinking, these paradigms are named from the perspective of the machinery, not the people using them.

A low-level language is said to be “close to the metal”. Your code is involved with manipulating individual blocks of memory and worrying about processor cycles. It’s very fussy work and it takes a lot of code to get anything done, but when you’ve got it written you can be confident that it will be incredibly efficientAssuming you’re knowledgeable and experienced, you didn’t create any major bugs, and the limitations of the target platform were made clear to you and were accurate. You know, the usual.. 

A high-level language allows you to express complex actions using very simple bits of easily-written code. It’s easy to write, but often wastes processor cycles and memory. How much? There are arguments all the time over whether the overhead for language X is significant or trivialAnd I’ll bet your viewpoint depends on your domain..

If you want to output the phrase “Hello World!” to the console, then here is how you do that using assembler, the lowest of the low-level languages:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game Programming Vexations Part 4: High Level vs. Low Level”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.