May 2008 Archives

I think the pragmatic programmer advices you to learn one new programming language each year. While this sounds perhaps plausible, I think this can be unattainable for the average non genius depending upon what you define learning as. Much like chess, programming languages are complex yet deceptively simple. You can teach the rules of chess to a novice in matter of minutes. Indeed within the hour a complete novice could be playing games on his/her own. Of course the games will usually end in disaster (and perhaps tears depending on age of the player). To learn the syntax of a new language is pretty easy. With reasonably good memory you could probably do this within a day for a simple enough language (i.e. not C++). If we call this learning the language, then sure we can follow the initial advice, but what would the point be? That would be aching to just memorize a new table each year to stretch your memory muscles.

Every now and then I go to the local electronics shop and just ... well, wander around for a little bit and see if there is anything that I'd like to buy. Anything that I do buy is of course completely unnecessary and I really shouldn't. This time around I had the feeble excuse that I needed a rather long TP cable. 30 minutes later I came out with the TP cable... and a 750 GB (bogus gb) harddrive. They had a sale and the price of $110 was kind of nice so I bought one.

Matrices seems to be some of the most misunderstood concepts of games programmers today. One does not even need to go into quaternions to find that just regular 4x4 matrices are surprisingly misunderstood.