Interview with Japanese demoscener 0x4015 (2017)

Re:Interview with Japanese demoscener 0x4015 (2017) by skrebbel on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @09:23AM (#18968384)

Programming skill isn't a 1 dimensional space.

I used to feel like you. Having done some mediocre demos myself, I looked up to some of the best democoders a lot. Until I met them (hey, demoscene is tiny - just show up at a demoparty and meet your heros in person). I noticed that the top democoders were invariably:

    - extremely nice
    - better than me at graphics programming
    - worse than me at X

For example, at some point long ago I wrote a tool to synchronize effects to music. A famous democoder wanted to try it, I said "here you go", he said "shit, the API is in C++. I don't know C++". Turns out all these amazing demos were written in C and this guy had never bothered to learn classes, templates, etc etc. Of course there's nothing wrong with that, but, well, it's just different skills. I mean every programmer I knew at that time knew C++. It's like working in web dev and not knowing any JavaScript at all. It was very surprising to me :-)

tl;dr I'm sure I make better scalable realtime backends than some top democoders would.

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Re:Interview with Japanese demoscener 0x4015 (2017) by Cthulhu_ on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @09:54AM (#18968624)

> tl;dr I'm sure I make better scalable realtime backends than some top democoders would.

Exactly; some make magic happen in 4K, others can spin up 4000 high performance GPU servers in a matter of minutes, out-performing the supercomputers of just a few years ago while costing a fraction of it. It's amazing how much power some can squeeze out with the tightest of constraints AND how much power others can summon with the biggest of credit cards. These two overlap, too.

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