Comment by hackinthebochs
5 years ago
Carmack is literally the top .1% (or higher) of ability and experience. Not to mention has mostly worked in a field with different constraints than most. I don't think looking to him for general development advice is all that useful.
I think the exact opposite.
Read the doom source code and you can see that he didn't mess around with trying to put everything into some nonsense function just because he has some part of a larger function that can be scoped and named.
The way he wrote programs even back then is very direct. You don't have to jump around into lots of different functions and files for no reason. There aren't many specialized data structures or overly clever syntax tricks to prove how smart he is.
There also aren't attempts to write overly general libraries with the idea that they will be reused 100 times in the future. Everything just does what it needs to do directly.
But why should any of that be aspirational to an "average" developer? It's like learning how to do mathematics by copying Terrence Tao's patterns of behavior. Perhaps Carmack's output is more a function of the programmer than an indication of good practice for average devs.
I guess I'm still not being clear - when you read John Carmack's programs you realize that it just isn't necessary to do complex nonsense.
If you take a look at the doom source code you realize this isn't the cutting edge of mathematics, he is cranking out great software by avoiding all that and using high school algebra (literally and figuratively) instead.
While other people spin their wheels sweating over following snake oil bob's pamphlet Carmack is making programs that people want, source code that people want and work that stands the test of time.
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