I got started similar to osk, basically "I want to make video gaem :DD" as a wee lad followed by installing GameMaker and making a crappy Mario RPG "clone" (you could walk around and that was it).. I also used Visual Basic a lot, I think being young and fascinated by computers it served as like the perfect playground to draft up ideas for programs, no matter how boring. It was neat being able to follow a stupid YouTube tutorial and make a notepad clone that actually worked.
I gave up for a couple years and ended up getting back into game development, this time using Java. Notch used to do livestreams where he'd program games for the 48-hour Ludum Dare competition, and I remember watching him make Prelude of the Chambered and just being stunned at how quickly he could write a software renderer on the fly like it was nothing. The ability to hot reload code on the JVM so you could make changes and see them apply in real-time was also super cool. There's a timelapse here:
This is singlehandedly what got me hooked on programming.. dude started from scratch and made a little universe with nothing but text. That was SO cool to me. This concept of starting with nothing appealed to me so much to the point I stopped really even caring about making games and just dabbled in building rendering engines for a few years. Initially with Java, then later on C++.
I also got into webdev a bit, initially because I just wanted to make a site to publish my games on. Sublime Text, PHP, XAMPP, just writing this stuff brings back cozy memories. I wrote some really dogshit PHP code.
Nowadays I run a business writing software for processing and analyzing weather data. The website is all mod_perl, no frameworks beyond what's in-house. The software responsible for handling the data is all written in C and C++, although newer components I've started writing in Rust (see the Rust thread). I don't really have time for game development anymore although I'd like to get back into it someday. Aside from that, all the other development I do consists of making dumb tools to make life a bit easier and contributing to FOSS every once in a while.
"Tools, man. Where are your tools?"
I'll start with the IDEs and editors.
The largest piece of software I develop is a front-end for accessing the aforementioned data. It's a pretty big C++ codebase with a decent-but-not-outrageous number of dependencies. If I'm developing on Windows—which I am in most cases since the customer base is also mostly Windows users—I use Visual Studio as my IDE and for other platforms I prefer CLion. Visual Studio is a steaming pile of shit but it still delivers the best workflow for systems programming on Windows. I like its debugger although the one in CLion is great too. Every once in a while I'll have to pull out WinDbg. I've also used KDevelop as an IDE in the past, and while I really like the UI, it's just too buggy (in typical KDE fashion) to be usable.
Outside of this one particular project though, all of my programming is done in GNU Emacs. I used to use JOE because it was the only terminal-based text editor that didn't feel like dogshit (sorry but I hate Vim & modal editing is stupid), but eventually wanted more features as well as an actual extensibility ecosystem. Emacs is super extensible. I could make a whole thread just talking about Emacs and all the things you can do with it, it's really a cool piece of software that's seldom discussed because of its learning curve and clunky UI. Its defaults are pretty bad. However once you get used to it and learn how to use the macro system it's so fast. I'd attribute my ability to work quickly at least partially to just being really good with Emacs.
C and C++ for application and systems stuff, although I've been adopting Rust more and more. Perl for everything else. Perl is ugly as shit but it's sooo nice for quickly jotting things together. I seldom write shell scripts because Perl just does it better. I use it for webdev as well. It's just so expressive. Raku's kind of neat too.. I've been meaning to make a thread talking about it similar to my Rust discussion but I haven't used it enough to really justify it yet.
For front-end webdev stuff I just use vanilla everything, no frameworks for anything. It's not the worst thing in the world. If you use JS the way it was originally intended it isn't that bad. Maybe if I'm in a hurry on a specific project I'll use Bootstrap or something to make CSS less of a hassle but I really just don't care. Maybe this isn't the most optimal way to do webdev but I don't care; the most optimal way to enjoy life is to not do webdev in the first place :D
I gave up for a couple years and ended up getting back into game development, this time using Java. Notch used to do livestreams where he'd program games for the 48-hour Ludum Dare competition, and I remember watching him make Prelude of the Chambered and just being stunned at how quickly he could write a software renderer on the fly like it was nothing. The ability to hot reload code on the JVM so you could make changes and see them apply in real-time was also super cool. There's a timelapse here:
This is singlehandedly what got me hooked on programming.. dude started from scratch and made a little universe with nothing but text. That was SO cool to me. This concept of starting with nothing appealed to me so much to the point I stopped really even caring about making games and just dabbled in building rendering engines for a few years. Initially with Java, then later on C++.
I also got into webdev a bit, initially because I just wanted to make a site to publish my games on. Sublime Text, PHP, XAMPP, just writing this stuff brings back cozy memories. I wrote some really dogshit PHP code.
Nowadays I run a business writing software for processing and analyzing weather data. The website is all mod_perl, no frameworks beyond what's in-house. The software responsible for handling the data is all written in C and C++, although newer components I've started writing in Rust (see the Rust thread). I don't really have time for game development anymore although I'd like to get back into it someday. Aside from that, all the other development I do consists of making dumb tools to make life a bit easier and contributing to FOSS every once in a while.
Tools
"Tools, man. Where are your tools?"
I'll start with the IDEs and editors.
The largest piece of software I develop is a front-end for accessing the aforementioned data. It's a pretty big C++ codebase with a decent-but-not-outrageous number of dependencies. If I'm developing on Windows—which I am in most cases since the customer base is also mostly Windows users—I use Visual Studio as my IDE and for other platforms I prefer CLion. Visual Studio is a steaming pile of shit but it still delivers the best workflow for systems programming on Windows. I like its debugger although the one in CLion is great too. Every once in a while I'll have to pull out WinDbg. I've also used KDevelop as an IDE in the past, and while I really like the UI, it's just too buggy (in typical KDE fashion) to be usable.
Outside of this one particular project though, all of my programming is done in GNU Emacs. I used to use JOE because it was the only terminal-based text editor that didn't feel like dogshit (sorry but I hate Vim & modal editing is stupid), but eventually wanted more features as well as an actual extensibility ecosystem. Emacs is super extensible. I could make a whole thread just talking about Emacs and all the things you can do with it, it's really a cool piece of software that's seldom discussed because of its learning curve and clunky UI. Its defaults are pretty bad. However once you get used to it and learn how to use the macro system it's so fast. I'd attribute my ability to work quickly at least partially to just being really good with Emacs.
"Which languages do you tend more to use for each type of project?"
C and C++ for application and systems stuff, although I've been adopting Rust more and more. Perl for everything else. Perl is ugly as shit but it's sooo nice for quickly jotting things together. I seldom write shell scripts because Perl just does it better. I use it for webdev as well. It's just so expressive. Raku's kind of neat too.. I've been meaning to make a thread talking about it similar to my Rust discussion but I haven't used it enough to really justify it yet.
For front-end webdev stuff I just use vanilla everything, no frameworks for anything. It's not the worst thing in the world. If you use JS the way it was originally intended it isn't that bad. Maybe if I'm in a hurry on a specific project I'll use Bootstrap or something to make CSS less of a hassle but I really just don't care. Maybe this isn't the most optimal way to do webdev but I don't care; the most optimal way to enjoy life is to not do webdev in the first place :D
"Do you know how to exit Vim without doing Ctrl+Z?"
:q!sudo apt-get install emacs
I once shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.
I'd really like it if you made an emacs thread. I've wanted to switch over to emacs for years but my main complains are speed (as I said before) and memory bloat (kind of scary to open your text editor and see 50 MiB being used) but there are so many features that look super cool. I was watching a youtube video and saw the guy pull out multiple cursors at once and it was very "hackerman" looking