Comment by ThePhysicist

> History tidbit: Jim Clark, the founder of SGI, invented the GPU which was what made SGI machines so fast at 3D.

Even more trivial: When I moved to Silicon Valley I bought a used Porsche on a whim (my recruiter implied it was a proper consultant accessory in SV) and fixed it up a bit until it became my daily driver. When I researched the title I discovered Jim Clark was the original owner. So I’d like to credit Jim Clark for starting me on the road to speed up my commute.

When it’s time to simplify and/or troubleshoot overly-complex things, I like to use the phrase “The abstraction is a distraction”.

> but it does so in the same way as writing your programs directly in assembly

> contains lots of magic numbers and very imperative code

Well, we really don't know if the code was written in this form by hand, don't we.

It could have been compiled into this, to use your words, "assembly with magic numbers and imperative" from much more elegant form. We may see this form only because this is what browsers understand.

I am not saying it was compiled, just speculating that seeing pure WebGL does not mean it was pure WebGL to begin with.

When there's physics, graphics and mathematics, there are magic numbers, which are results of formulas which needs to be computed once, or material properties, or nature's constants.

Also, nature and graphics works as an imperative parallel machine. So the code mirrors that.

This is not written deliberately this way. Code comes out like that when you strip all the libraries, fluff, and other less-related stuff.

I also write a scientific application, and yes, This is the way.

it depends if you are doing something to get paid, or to last, or to be really good. only in the first case do i ever consider a heap of abstractions

On a scale of 1 to 10 how strongly are we talking here?

> has the potential to be the most performant

It also has the potential to evolve in the most efficient way.

minified js is not greatly smaller than gzipped js, I think the whole minification thing is a swing and a miss and now we have to deal with source maps and shit, and build pipelines and etc

    $ ls -la
    -rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 330905 May  4 22:56 watch.js
    -rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 152172 May  4 22:55 watch.min.js

    $ gzip watch.js
    $ gzip watch.min.js
    $ ls -la
    -rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 43690 May  4 22:56 watch.js.gz
    -rw-r--r-- 1 jack 197609 32507 May  4 22:55 watch.min.js.gz

A discoverable version would be to include source maps that link to the original as well. That way a browser console will automatically pull up the original.

People measure minification in byte size (unfortunately I guess you're charged by CDNs by that metric too?). In reality everything text based compresses really well over the wire. In either case, importing tons of libs left and right is going to vastly out-size any minification, yet most fe devs are very liberal with dependencies.

Minification strips comments too though, which may be undesirable in many cases.

That's simply not a very well followed (and thus discoverable) standard. Especially for hand crafted code, minifying functions and variable names only obfuscates what is written and minifying whitespace often only has minimal benifits.

In practice this seems to be a lost cause, and links to alternatively hosted source code is more common. Sadly this makes is simple to introduce subtle, harmful differences between the source and what is hosted.

It's hard to guess that extra assets exist on the server if they aren't being pulled down by the site itself.

Seems better just to have premassaged source available in a repo somewhere, or called out on the page itself for a downloaded archive.

Where are the comments in his code? :-)

We definitely won't if people are taught that frameworks are the only option and never allowed to just write a full program on their own.

Maybe, maybe not. We should do the experiment, though.

Cool example, but all r3f is doing here is just providing the threejs camera, controls and the text with emoji, the watch itself is loaded as a .glb file, where I'd assume most people would be interested in learning about.

You will not catch me writing 9000 lines of code to make a blog post. Extremely impressive stuff.

> How does one even learn how to make something this amazing?

I haven't done anything quite this amazing, but I have created other things with minimal upfront knowledge and "the way" is simple: just jump in and give it your best shot with what you already know, identify the most glaring deficiency in what you made, take your best shot at solving that, and repeat that process until you have something cool. You can also use this process to focus what you spend time studying/learning, as you backfill the information you were missing to figure out how to overcome whatever obstacles you encounter.

It does take time, but you know what they say about long journeys and single steps. Sometimes there are no shortcuts and you just have to take a lot of steps.

Why not? What's wrong with it?

"There's little benefit to writing your own asm these days"

Agreed, but programming in ASM makes one think differently. In my opinion every programmer should do some elementary Assembler as part of their training, say some basic projects based on 8086 stuff or even the simpler 8085/Z80 etc. It's a long while since I've done any serious ASM work but the techniques one learns and the ideas one develops frame important attitudes that can't be easily gathered from high level stuff (one gains a better understanding of the underlying hardware and such).

You're right, we still need people for this work, it'd be pretty hard to optimize a compiler without them methinks.

FYI, there's stuff I omitted to mention in the above comment, I mentioned it below in my reply to bitcurious. It's interesting 'fitness for purpose' arises given your ASM comment.

I fully accept your point that 'most young people don’t even have access to a mechanical watch these days' but I'd contend that that ought not be relevant (as I'll explain in a moment).

First, I should say that I was perhaps a little harsh in my above comment and I didn't convey what I actually wanted to say. Unfortunately, I was distracted by the somewhat irritating fact that I couldn't view any of those drawings on two different smartphones (I could read the article but only saw white spaces where the drawings were supposed to be). It was only later when logged onto my PC that I could view them, and even then the whole page was sluggish and a pain to view. Perhaps those with faster equipment and or faster internet connection had better luck.

Thus, the thinly-veiled message behind my comment was a question about fitness for purpose—both about the subject matter and its method of delivery. My cynical inference was that if people today didn't already understand the basics of gearing, mechanical advantage and escapement mechanisms etc. then something has gone wrong with the education system in that the basics of how clocks worked were well covered in physics (in mechanics) during my first year in high school—and that should not have changed as we still live and move around in a mechanical world—and thousands of industrial mechanical devices use these principles and rely on people having a good working knowledge of them.

By third year physics, everything relevant about the essential workings of a clock would also have been covered at a basic mathematical level: Hooke's Law, gears and gear ratios, friction and simple harmonic motion. Even temperature expansion and contraction and the need to compensate for them was discussed (and in this context the physics teacher even discussed Harrison's famous chronometer and how his design included temperature compensation to ensure that changes in these parameters did not impact heavily on time drift).

In essence, by third year, everything of important in that article had been covered in the school curriculum. If articles such as that under discussion are now being used to compensate for the lack of training in high school science then we have a serious problem with the education system.

Incidentally, even if one's not interested in clock mechanisms, it's worth having a look at this 19th Century publication on mechanical movements that's on the Internet Archive (there are more types around than most people have ever likely considered: https://archive.org/details/Mechanical_Movements_507

And it was worth it.