>That video and Casey Muratori's "The Thirty Million Line Problem" video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk

Such a banger

jon blow is a great example to bring up. he's extremely talented and focused on his craft, and has been churning for decades, unburdened by family, to produce his work, with very talented engineers contributing (including muratori). in the last twenty years, they have shipped two puzzle games.

i don't say that to suggest it's unimpressive, but rather to point out that adopting his methodology of avoiding anything resembling modern languages and tooling comes at a cost. the cost includes a huge hit to productivity. if everyone built games the way these two suggest, there would be orders of magnitude fewer of games available. if everyone built software the way these two suggest, there would be orders of magnitude less software available. i'm sure they would be fine with that outcome. the rest of the world probably would not.

I think your concept of productivity is faulty.

The point being made is that your increased speed to market comes at a cost

Yes there are many applications that probably just don't need to exist but you can make a living cranking out

Not everyone should do any one thing all the time. But we have to be careful not to always discard hard work in favor of speed and convenience.

Jon Blow and Casey Muratori are reminding people to take responsibility for what we're doing. Learn how things work and be ambitious.

Why?

Watch the video

Eh, Rare was putting out multiple games in a short timespan of larger size in programming teams fairly small in the 90s. The tools themselves don't seem specific to inducing incredibly large development times when the game developers before Blow managed to do it faster and better.

Your point still stands (there's research floating around proving it) but Blow isn't the best example.

"Docker and Electron are the most hyped new technologies of the last five years. Both are not about improving things, figuring out complexity or reducing it. Both are just compromised attempts to hide accumulated complexity from developers because it became impossible to deal with.

And that’s sad."

2019, but it still checks out.

That Jon video was hard to finish. Guy complains about software complexity, uses Windows 10. If you want simplicity, go use Ken Thompson's 3-week v0 UNIX that had an editor, a compiler and some syscalls. What else do you need? Oh, you want drivers, networking and GUIs?! Too bad, because these have multiple orders more complexity! Also by his logic, you're only allowed things that you could recreate from scratch.

For balance, he does make a good point about the upper limit of complexity and how hard it is to transfer the knowledge required to the next person doing the job. Perhaps if we normalized documenting everything to the point where someone new could just pick it up by reading the docs as well as get the time from the company to actually do it, there might be more incentives to keep things simpler.

The man develops video games to be sold and played by other people. His primary target is Windows, so he develops on Windows.

So it's good enough - the mantra of software development that explains a lot of what he's talking about. He's not entitled to being able to "just put pixels on a screen" while also distributing his games to be ran on his users' computers. He could develop his games for MS-DOS, but he has chosen not to.

Look, I complain about software quality probably more than most, but it's good to remember that it's more of an emotional issue rather than an objective one. I did not find his arguments about programmer productivity convincing. As a whole, software is doing what it's supposed to and, besides, it could have always been worse.