It's true, but all of those games are... well...

Zachtronics doesn't pull any punches. Their games are amazing. Even the deceptively simple Infinifactory is actually full of amazing and beautiful opportunities for elegant programming concepts (the first time you realize, "I can... I can make a clock with controllably variable periodicity!? What?" And TIS-100 resembles programming in a stripped down Erlang-like mode.

HRM is a great starter into the Genre, it's sure. But Spacechem is on a totally different level of complexity and beauty and depth.

What I should have said is that Zachtronics has the market cornered on programming puzzle games for programmers. I could suggest Human Resource Machine to someone who has never programmed before, but I would never do that with TIS-100.

Making a TIS emulator in Elixir sounds like a fun and useless project.

Somebody's already done one in C: https://eviltrout.com/2015/06/29/an-emulator-for-tis-100.htm...

And according to Zach, the intended market wasn't just programmers (which is why he explicitly killed bit manipulation, and the largest number a TIS-100 register can hold isn't a power of two), and I've heard tales of non-programmers enjoying it.

Then again, if you like Zachtronics games, especially TIS-100, then have I got a hobby for you...

If TIS-100 is erlang, than Spacechem is C. Enjoy the fun of continually worrying that you forgot a sync/mutex.

Not to mention the game that inspired Minecraft.

Along with Dwarf Fortress

Do you think those games can make you better at some kinds of programming?

Of course. They're effectively excercises for the parts of your brain that you use most while programming.

The model of TIS-100 is more like the blocking channels in Go.

Nah, it's really not! I think the author even mentioned the actor model in an interview about it. And Go certainly has never desired to be associated as "the actor model." It lacks many of the tools required.

A good friend of mine is totally into hackmud: https://www.hackmud.com

It looked neat but I have the same problem as with music games like Guitar Hero etc - I'd rather continue programming on one of my many pet projects or practice playing actual guitar...

I may be missing out though - I wouldn't know because I actually never invested more than 30 minutes in any of those games (also bought TIS-100 last year, never actually played it once).

Incidentally - are there any music games (rhythm, composition, etc) that are similarly "hardcore" as a TIS-100 that anyone would recommend?

I finally might be giving TIS-100 another shot as it is Sunday and all :)

There's Rocksmith. It's essentially Guitar Hero just with a real guitar. So you do actually learn to play the instrument.

Yep. My favorite games are pretty much: anything by Zachtronics, Rocksmith 2014.

Rocksmith does have its annoyances at times, though (the note recognition isn't perfect, so if you don't play absolutely perfectly it's going to miss notes occasionally, making the more difficult songs very hard to 100%).

Rocksmith looks really cool, I will check it out - thanks a lot for sharing!

Just found this article by coincidence, linking here for future reference:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/10/03/can-video-games-...

Else Heart.Break() has definite aesthetic charm, but the programming required (as far as I played, at least) is pretty shallow- geared towards clever highschoolers, I suspect.

A collaboration between them and Zachtronics would be lovely.

Grade or middle school, really. "Clever highschoolers" are writing their own bare-metal OSes these days.

And us stupid highschoolers are writing IF engines in Scheme.

And yes, I did write one. It totally sucked, but it did work, mostly.

Heck, if you're doing anything substantial with Scheme in high school then you're on a great track.

Now if it was substantial, it wouldn't suck so much, now would it?

> "Clever highschoolers" are writing their own bare-metal OSes these days.

Perhaps you are even right since advanced Arduino programming (which many "Clever highschoolers" should be able to do) is in some sense like writing a really simple RTOS. :-)

Or, well, there are the highschoolers who are actually writing OSes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045254 :P

And of course, let us not forget that a clever highschooler wrote Babel.