T w e n t y S i d e d

I need something handy that will let me change program options without needing to compile. Right now I have everything bound to mysterious and unexplained hotkeys. There are enough of these that I’m getting confused. Hotkeys are great for turning things on and off, but terrible for fine-tuning options. It looks like I need some sort of interface for my program.

This computer interface is notable for the upper-arm and back conditioning required to use it. The upside is that, if it’s adopted, Photoshop artists will eventually look like bodybuilders.

Now, I’m always banging on about how libraries should be as focused and unencumbered as possible, how you shouldn’t need to go on a multi-stage fetch quest to get the thing to compile like you were trying to assemble the pieces of the Tri-Force or something. The problem is, there is pretty much no way around this. Interfaces need to use fonts, and fonts are fiendishly complex beasts. Interfaces need to render stuff, and rendering is complicated. They need to process keyboard and mouse input, and those are complicated. (It seems simple, but tracking keyboards and mouse wheels and all the different things that can happen with the CTRL, ALT, and NUMPAD… it gets very hairy.) That’s a lot of things for one library to do, on top of running a window system with buttons and scrollbars and the ability to tab between interface elements and all of the other tiny details that we all take for granted.

Still, the inability to adjust options is really killing my productivity. So let’s see what we can find.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Frontier #16: Interface’d”

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.

One of the things I like about this project is that it is uncluttered by goofy, awkwardly-designed libraries. Sure, I could have grabbed some existing code for loading 3D files or animating figures, but I still would have been faced with the problem of getting them all to work together with my program. It’s possible that I might have saved time, but it’s also possible that I would have spent those four days pulling my hair out and solving strange dependency issues and going on fetch quests to get all the stuff it requires, only to discover that it didn’t work properly. Then I would have had the problem I feared: A huge, complex system that doesn’t work and no idea how to fix it.

And even if it did work, I wouldn’t really want to have an extra ten modules cluttering up my program, with thousands of lines of foreign (to me) code, the bulk of which I’ll never need or use, all in the name of saving me a day of work. There’s a trade-off at work here (like there always is) where you exchange compactness, elegance, and maintainability for time. At some point it becomes worth it, but I always advise caution when integrating foreign code. Even if the other library was made by someone smarter and more experienced than myself, the truth remains that they didn’t design their code with my project in mind.

Worse, when integrating external libraries like this there’s always the chance you’ll spend the time and end up with nothing. (Although, I think my professional experience has improved my ability to spot the packages likely to become duds and time-sinks. In fact, yesterday’s post touched on that: Look at the interface of a library. If it’s cluttered, obtuse, verbose, and confusing to use, you should be extremely reluctant to add it to your project, even if it solves critical problems. Right now, you only have one problem. Don’t trade it for six others.

Hang on a second. I feel like I’ve done this rant before…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Frontier #15: Devil of a Problem”

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.

There’s a book called Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days, which can be read for free online if you have the inclination. When people have come to me asking for suggestions about where to begin with C++, that’s usually where I send them. Looking back, I’m not sure that was the best move. Although, I don’t really know where else to send them. College maybe? That’s an excruciatingly expensive and time-consuming way to learn, and probably not a good choice for the curious person looking to test the waters. Even that might be a bad idea. A lot of people seem to read books and take courses and emerge on the other side having no idea how to make useful software.

Imagine a book titled, “Become a novelist in 21 days.” There’s also a college course that purports to teach you novel-writing skills. Inside, you will be instructed in grammar, spelling, punctuation, proper capitalization, and page formatting. Afterward, you march out into the wide world calling yourself a “novelist”. I mean, that’s what writing a novel is, right? Putting words together? And you totally know how to do that. You got an A and everything.

I’ll admit I’ve never seen the inside of a university as a student, and I’ll freely admit Ive got shameful gaps in my knowledge as a self-taught coder. But the way C++ is taught seems to have the most alarming omissions. For example, I know people supposedly educated in C/C++ who have never had to:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Learning to Program vs. Learning to Write Software”

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.