Programming

Introduction For my personal project, I’m working on a simple and relaxing asteroid mining game. It spent a long time as a prototype, simplified from many other voxel-based games into this one, which feels realistic to achieve. I’ve been working on it and the tech around it for years, with irregular spurts of activity, lots of abandoned paths, and much thrown away work. My plan is to use WebGL in some form and deploy it to the desktop via the web (or even Electron), and use Cordova to handle the mobile version of it. Since it’s faux 2D with voxels, I think mobile is a viable target. This is pending tests. Mobile or not, this game needs to be made. I realized this when I was testing the old Unity prototype, and found myself getting lost playing it long after I’d tested whatever functionality I was curious about during that run. ...

Unit tests, type checkers, SAT provers. These are all tools we use to verify our code, and it’s by no means an exhaustive list. People struggle with using them though. Ruby and Python engineers typically find static type systems too cumbersome. Instead they favor more unit tests (those that do unit testing). C# and Java engineers generally like the benefits of static checks to make sure interfaces are respected (except null - seriously wut r u doing?). On the more extreme end you have tools like Haskell that are statically typed in a way C# and Java engineers can’t even wrap their heads around without major study. ...

For all of the flak Javascript gets, there is one thing it has above all of the “better” mainstream languages out there. I’m talking Java, C#, Python, Ruby (yeah you two are mainstream to me). Javascript has functions as first class objects. As a result, Javascript has been my gateway drug to functional programming. Functional programming has a lot of interesting promises to it, but it’s been damn frustrating at times to learn. Everything is so damn generic that it’s hard to understand when it’s time to pull out certain patterns/functions/operations, at least as an outsider looking in. I’ve really stuck with it, and it feels like it’s gotten better over time. There’s still much for me to learn, but I feel like I’ve climbed over some humps. ...

I’ve spent a lot of my tech career pursuing the One True Language, or One True Library, or some means of doing something in a unified way that could serve as an answer to the problems I was having. The polyglot folks would probably just say some langauges are better than others at certain things and so we should use several languages at once when building applications. I’m not sure I agree with this. I believe most of our languages are pretty good at the problem domains we select them for, or at least they could be. ...