How Scary Can an Old-School Programmer Be? (2013)

Re:How Scary Can an Old-School Programmer Be? (2013) by chuck4932 on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @06:17AM (#16114121)

> Just imagine for a second, that a programmer like this, or a group like Future Crew decides to...focus on just one goal – create a small code that steals your financial data or helps to re-calibrate a Nuclear Reactor. How do you think, would they succeed?

These are no doubt talented coders but the article makes out that they posses some kind of superpower and can do whatever they want with computers. Coding graphics like that in assembler is an impressive feat but it in no way means that these guys could just "break the Windows or Apple integrated security systems" if they wanted to.

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Re:How Scary Can an Old-School Programmer Be? (2013) by infinity0 on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @06:31AM (#16114189)

Another thing is that we don't see how their code generalises - how it performs for different scenes not shown in the demos. The world changes and one's code has to adapt to these changes, it is no good super-optimising some assembly to generate a scene in 64kb when it takes 3 years to edit that same assembly to generate a different scene.

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Re:How Scary Can an Old-School Programmer Be? (2013) by throwaway2016a on Wednesday January 10, 2018 @08:11AM (#16114645)

Depends on your goal. If you're playing code golf and the whole point is a small executable then it is "good"

But to a point I think you were making, skills to do that do not necessarily translate to real-world software engineering.

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