July 16, 2012 at 18:18Quiet majority of experts
- Transfer
Back in the days when I was following the comp.lang.forth band at Usenet, I was not the only one who was unpleasantly surprised at the lack of people who could do interesting things with Fort. Elizabeth Rater, co-founder of Forth, Inc., offered the following explanation: there are people who deal with real language problems, but they don’t sit in the newsgroup. She knew this for sure: her company was created to support the creation of commercial projects at Fort.
In 1996, I worked on porting The Need for Speed to Sega Saturn. (Does this game console seem unusual for you to get in touch with? And I was developing for 3DO and attended the Jaguar conference in the Atari head office.) Already in the 90s there were a number of well-known developers, but leading specialists who worked on the original version of the released in 1994, The Need for Speed, were unknown to anyone. And this despite the fact that they wrote a game based on solid state physics before most others found out that these words generally refer to the development of 3D video games. And they did it without a mathematical coprocessor: the whole engine used fixed-point arithmetic.
Yes, now many people write on blogs or in some other way publicly discuss the methodology and what they are working on now, but there are even more people who do not. Blogging takes time, and, for example, not everyone likes it. Others are working on commercial products and cannot afford to divulge the internal developments of their own code.
An unusual aspect of our online discussions is that we cannot learn anything from a quiet majority. The fact that there is a halo of contempt around C ++, Perl, or other languages does not mean that these languages are not used by very smart guys who build amazing, well-executed programs. An insanely addicted attractive theory can have well-known but unobvious flaws. We see only the opinions of people who work on interesting things and write about them - that's all. Most developers, for example, Chrome does not have active Twitter profiles, does not write to blogs, does not use Github, you can only contact them on mailing lists and bug reports, and that is only because Chrome is free software.
You would rather try a lot yourself, than listen to what others think.
In 1996, I worked on porting The Need for Speed to Sega Saturn. (Does this game console seem unusual for you to get in touch with? And I was developing for 3DO and attended the Jaguar conference in the Atari head office.) Already in the 90s there were a number of well-known developers, but leading specialists who worked on the original version of the released in 1994, The Need for Speed, were unknown to anyone. And this despite the fact that they wrote a game based on solid state physics before most others found out that these words generally refer to the development of 3D video games. And they did it without a mathematical coprocessor: the whole engine used fixed-point arithmetic.
Yes, now many people write on blogs or in some other way publicly discuss the methodology and what they are working on now, but there are even more people who do not. Blogging takes time, and, for example, not everyone likes it. Others are working on commercial products and cannot afford to divulge the internal developments of their own code.
An unusual aspect of our online discussions is that we cannot learn anything from a quiet majority. The fact that there is a halo of contempt around C ++, Perl, or other languages does not mean that these languages are not used by very smart guys who build amazing, well-executed programs. An insanely addicted attractive theory can have well-known but unobvious flaws. We see only the opinions of people who work on interesting things and write about them - that's all. Most developers, for example, Chrome does not have active Twitter profiles, does not write to blogs, does not use Github, you can only contact them on mailing lists and bug reports, and that is only because Chrome is free software.
You would rather try a lot yourself, than listen to what others think.