T w e n t y S i d e d

The annotation continues…

39:00 Exceptions Are Silly.

Exceptions are where you run a bit of code, but you sort of leave a note for the program, “If anything goes wrong, jump to this bit of code and spit out such-and-such message.” Here is the video Blow mentioned, which talks about why exceptions are such a mess.

My experience with exceptions is pretty limited. In my professional work, we used a large codebase that began life in 1994 as vanilla C. Somewhere around 2000-ish we migrated (in fits and starts) to C++. So I didn’t even have a chance to use exceptions until 2000, and we didn’t really have a lot of need for them. Our software was pretty mature and we already had all the error handling we needed.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A new programming language for games, Annotated: Part 3”

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.

The annotation continues…

6:00 Garbage collection.

In C++, you have manual memory management. You need to request enough memory to hold all your space marines. If you need more marinesWho doesn’t? you have to allocate more memory. When you’re done with a marine, you have to tell the system you don’t need that chunk of memory anymore. You can’t ever make a mistake, because using memory you’ve freed causes a crash. Using memory you haven’t yet obtained causes a crash. Trying to free the same bit of memory more than once causes a crash. And forgetting to free memory causes a memory leak where your program will consume more and more until it crashes.

And by “crash” I mean, “It might crash or it might malfunction badly somewhere later and you’ll have NO IDEA where it all went wrong.”

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A new programming language for games, Annotated: Part 2”

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.

Jon Blow is the designer of Braid and one of the first of the new-wave indie auteurs. Back in September of 2014 he made a video talking about his ideas for a new computer language focused on game development.

I wanted to write about this when the video came out, but I was in the middle of a move. Then there was Christmas. Then other projects. But now almost half a year later, I’m finally coming back to this. His project has moved on and I don’t know where it is now, but it’s this first video I want to talk about.

That’s an hour and a half talk about why he thinks game development needs a new language, why the existing languages don’t quite cut it, and a few things he thinks the new language ought to do. It’s pretty heavy-duty in terms of technical jargon, so if you’re not a coder I don’t know if you’ll get much out of it.

I’ve seen people criticizing his suggestions saying that other languages already do what he wants, or that he’s not qualified to design a language. I’m not really qualified to comment on that and not really interested in that debate. I’m more interested in his talk as a sort of “Everything annoying, frustrating, inefficient, or scary about the C languages”.

So I want to comment on what he’s said, and I’m going to do my best to say it in language that should be comprehensible for non-programmers. We’re not so much discussing his language ideas as using them as a launching point for talking about things that make programming less fun.

Consider this a consolation that we didn’t get an annotated version Carmack QuakeCon address last year like we have in years past. Sadface.

Timestamps are approximate:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A new programming language for games, Annotated: Part 1”

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.