I think mediocre is meant more in an absolute skill scale sense. Imagine if you went to get a surgery and had a 50/50 chance of the surgeon killing you. That's the state coding is in, whereas the average practicing surgeon is definitely competent enough to not lose most of their patients on the table.
I like this channel but one word of advice / a humble request: Please make those clips a bit longer so as to give more context. It's just too short. Not enough substance. If you want to do Jon's thoughts justice, you should include more context or possibly even edit multiple clips together to illuminate a shared point.
I wrote my own OS and compiler once and started off my career with C without an IDE and MMU (seg faults - your computer is now dead sucker - hit the reboot button) now doing React JS just for the money as C was no longer paying the bills :).
At my company the trend is for every software production needs to be accessible in the web browser, because then you are device independent, which is very important, because we use 100 % windows and nothing else.
Very often game programmers are not good programmers. We often see lack of experience from different programming languages, lack of clean code practices, difficulties to handle complexity, lack of distributed systems knowledge, lack of formal verification practices... Many games are also not portable so game programmers also often fail to write software to portable. Oh, I almost forgot. Huge amount of games have actually shitty code. That is significant factor why games often has old and abandoned and nobody can maintain these dung heaps. Very good real life example is a well rated game called Alien vs Predator. Code of the game is released to open source but even the game is good, no one is maintaining it.
Yeah. I got out of game dev professionally in part because there was only like five game studios near me and I had worked at three of them already. Went into enterprise web dev instead and instantly increased my salary by 50%. It would be difficult to get back into professional gamedev nowadays, despite working on games in my spare time, as I would likely take a significant paycut to get back in (maybe as much as a 50% paycut), and it seems layoffs are even more of a problem in gamedev right now, which is the other part of why I left in the first place (all of the game studios I worked at had major layoffs, including me, after they released one of their games). There are different levels of webdev. Slapping together a simple CRUD app? Sure, not too difficult. But getting all the requested business logic for manipulating massive amounts of data for a financial client, for example, to work together well and figuring out the right architecture for their needs can get quite very complicated, as well as figuring out how to get some needed UI library to do something the client wants that it doesn't seem to really be designed to do. Overall, I've probably had more head scratching moments during webdev than I have so far in gamedev, unless you count trying to debug some weird graphics bug or dealing with memory limitations, those were the most challenging problems for me for gamedev (the rest has been mostly design related, coming up with the most fun gameplay and determining what features to include in the game with a limited budget and deadline).
@@gruntaxeman3740 True. Jon himself has a bunch of weird takes on programming that probably come from his primarily game oriented background. And I also found myself this because I started doing game programming, and only after I switched to general programming (both application, web-dev and backend) I started noticing and fixing problems with my coding patterns. Nowadays I still do game programming, but the feeling is much more safe and the code feels much better in all ways.
I mean… there are shitty low level jobs too. I have one where my boss wants us to write low level performance code in unsafe C# because he wants memory safety, but is also worried about the cold start time.
c/c++ is a mid-level language (mid-level productivity compared to high level languages), ie you have to (or can) keep track of many many things that will slow your over-all productivity of anything.
Most people in all fields are mediocre. At the end of the day, the vast majority of people are simply trying to get paid to support a decent life for their families, which is completely fine. Few people have curious minds and want to improve their skills beyond the bare minimum necessary to stay employed.
i want to add to this that life is a time spent tradeoff. either you put your time into being outstanding in whatever you do, or you spend time with family, friends, gatherings, other hobbies and be better at social stuff, keep more connections, being more present and have fun doing other things. i dont say that one is better than the other, its whatever persons priorities are. mediocrity can def be a choice
And most of those think they are good programmers even the really bad ones. So they all like videos like this and complain how bad the rest of them are in the comments.
To the developers reading this: me too I love coding, and design patterns, and fast code, etc… but who are you trying to impress? Jonathan Blow, Linus Torvalds, and John Carmack? Or Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk? A lot of people said that Musk was a poor coder. Even him if I recall correctly. Before responding remember which component allowed someone like Steven Hawking to have a wife, when most of you don’t… Life is a compromise, don’t forget to win, as a man, in this world💰
he seems to have a very limited perspective. the *good* JS "Frameworkers" i know have very different skillsets like UI/UX, human design and stuff like animation. He always goes from the perspective of someone doing low level stuff. Especially in video game development you have games like Undertale, which is programmed very poorly but exceeds in writing/music/creativity. Dont get me wrong, it cannot hurt learning low level languages - even if you never need them, but calling all of these people "mediocre" just because you focus on different aspects, idk...
And there is also full stack programmers, who can work fluently from low level to high level using any language, and best ones know business and processes too. For this reason, working on higher level and solving problems top-down is associated to trait of good programmers. And for using Javascript... well, it is horrible language. Just like english. Nevertheless, I write the comments and name the functions using english vocabulary and not use some "better" language. For very same reason as I use english, I often write code using Typescript using NestJS framework. It mitigates some javascript issues even though it's down there.
i think many of the smartest people have a hard time understanding that being smart is only partly a choice. also there will always be many mediocre of anything because you see excellence (or mediocrity) purely through difference in skill. so basically when someone says "there are many mediocre programmers", they say "i see many people making decisions i dont agree with" (irrespective, if they can be shown to be correct).
yes but for me to get a job to do interesting things i have to grind away at a mediocre one at first so i have experience on my resume that literally every fucking position with a little bit of skill requires. its a shit market. id happily work as a low level engine programmer but guess what? you need fucking credentials for that too
JavaScript is a flawed toy language, if web developers had been smart they would have ditched HTML/CSS/JavaScript for the benefit of a sandbox machine code for online usage, and webapp would basically be a sandboxed EXE binary or ELF binary in sandbox mode, it would have been like making a native system program but for internet.
@@gruntaxeman3740 WASM is just patchwork on top of the already huge browser stack. You can't use WASM to draw directly to a browser viewport without a javascript shim. Maybe someday we'll see a general purpose sandboxed WASM runtime that points to a URL and runs the result.
@@1e0isfdkorblpg I totally agree, for sending hypertext documents. However most "websites" are a hack around html and css to provide a full application. If we separate application functionality into a lightweight sandboxed runtime, we could see actually performant internet-based programs that don't need the "web stack". Say, compiling a C program to some intermediate representation that can be ran by entering a URL. Of course HTTP would not be appropriate anymore, but you get the idea.
Idea of web is to be accessible, so everything that is not remotely human readable is not option. Also there should be no dependency to CPU architecture. ActiveX was tried and that failed. Google actually tried to put Dart VM to browser but that didn't catch on. Mozilla was afraid that would just add fragmentation and break compatibility we now have, and most likely Apple would not have accepted either. Javascript strength is that it works.
Usually best programmers are application programmers and application UI is usually done using browser engine. That means that best programmers compile part of the software for Javascript.
Actually most programmers are mediocre because of normal distribution
Most likely ≠ most
depends on the threshold of mediocre
Not everything is a bell curve. Just the average of the average of everything.
I think mediocre is meant more in an absolute skill scale sense. Imagine if you went to get a surgery and had a 50/50 chance of the surgeon killing you. That's the state coding is in, whereas the average practicing surgeon is definitely competent enough to not lose most of their patients on the table.
mediocre understandings of statistics lead to nonsense like this
I like this channel but one word of advice / a humble request: Please make those clips a bit longer so as to give more context. It's just too short. Not enough substance. If you want to do Jon's thoughts justice, you should include more context or possibly even edit multiple clips together to illuminate a shared point.
And this is why Jon disabled vods.
I wrote my own OS and compiler once and started off my career with C without an IDE and MMU (seg faults - your computer is now dead sucker - hit the reboot button) now doing React JS just for the money as C was no longer paying the bills :).
Dayumm bro 🫠
i ask copilot to review my code all the time and that made me realize how dogshit my code actually is
Checkmate. I never got a job.
At my company the trend is for every software production needs to be accessible in the web browser, because then you are device independent, which is very important, because we use 100 % windows and nothing else.
He's spittin fax no printer.
He is right
No he isn't.
Yes, eveyone should be a low level systems / game programmer. Because there's definitely a career in those fields for everyone.
Very often game programmers are not good programmers. We often see lack of experience from different programming languages, lack of clean code practices, difficulties to handle complexity, lack of distributed systems knowledge, lack of formal verification practices... Many games are also not portable so game programmers also often fail to write software to portable.
Oh, I almost forgot. Huge amount of games have actually shitty code. That is significant factor why games often has old and abandoned and nobody can maintain these dung heaps. Very good real life example is a well rated game called Alien vs Predator. Code of the game is released to open source but even the game is good, no one is maintaining it.
Yeah. I got out of game dev professionally in part because there was only like five game studios near me and I had worked at three of them already. Went into enterprise web dev instead and instantly increased my salary by 50%.
It would be difficult to get back into professional gamedev nowadays, despite working on games in my spare time, as I would likely take a significant paycut to get back in (maybe as much as a 50% paycut), and it seems layoffs are even more of a problem in gamedev right now, which is the other part of why I left in the first place (all of the game studios I worked at had major layoffs, including me, after they released one of their games).
There are different levels of webdev. Slapping together a simple CRUD app? Sure, not too difficult. But getting all the requested business logic for manipulating massive amounts of data for a financial client, for example, to work together well and figuring out the right architecture for their needs can get quite very complicated, as well as figuring out how to get some needed UI library to do something the client wants that it doesn't seem to really be designed to do.
Overall, I've probably had more head scratching moments during webdev than I have so far in gamedev, unless you count trying to debug some weird graphics bug or dealing with memory limitations, those were the most challenging problems for me for gamedev (the rest has been mostly design related, coming up with the most fun gameplay and determining what features to include in the game with a limited budget and deadline).
@@gruntaxeman3740
True. Jon himself has a bunch of weird takes on programming that probably come from his primarily game oriented background. And I also found myself this because I started doing game programming, and only after I switched to general programming (both application, web-dev and backend) I started noticing and fixing problems with my coding patterns. Nowadays I still do game programming, but the feeling is much more safe and the code feels much better in all ways.
I mean… there are shitty low level jobs too. I have one where my boss wants us to write low level performance code in unsafe C# because he wants memory safety, but is also worried about the cold start time.
@@notactuallyarealperson2267
But C# cold start time is not affected by using unsafe C#, you can get less cold start by using AOT instead
I will put it nicely: you can either have your latte or you can be a good programmer, not both.
c/c++ is a mid-level language (mid-level productivity compared to high level languages), ie you have to (or can) keep track of many many things that will slow your over-all productivity of anything.
watched this many years ago and i got out
Most people in all fields are mediocre. At the end of the day, the vast majority of people are simply trying to get paid to support a decent life for their families, which is completely fine. Few people have curious minds and want to improve their skills beyond the bare minimum necessary to stay employed.
i want to add to this that life is a time spent tradeoff. either you put your time into being outstanding in whatever you do, or you spend time with family, friends, gatherings, other hobbies and be better at social stuff, keep more connections, being more present and have fun doing other things. i dont say that one is better than the other, its whatever persons priorities are. mediocrity can def be a choice
how do you get out
opened the door
And most of those think they are good programmers even the really bad ones. So they all like videos like this and complain how bad the rest of them are in the comments.
Yeah, tell me that 10 years ago.
Same
To the developers reading this: me too I love coding, and design patterns, and fast code, etc… but who are you trying to impress? Jonathan Blow, Linus Torvalds, and John Carmack? Or Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk? A lot of people said that Musk was a poor coder. Even him if I recall correctly. Before responding remember which component allowed someone like Steven Hawking to have a wife, when most of you don’t… Life is a compromise, don’t forget to win, as a man, in this world💰
I tried responding but then I remembered that Steven Hawking has a wife adn then ... I forgot..
he seems to have a very limited perspective. the *good* JS "Frameworkers" i know have very different skillsets like UI/UX, human design and stuff like animation. He always goes from the perspective of someone doing low level stuff. Especially in video game development you have games like Undertale, which is programmed very poorly but exceeds in writing/music/creativity.
Dont get me wrong, it cannot hurt learning low level languages - even if you never need them, but calling all of these people "mediocre" just because you focus on different aspects, idk...
And there is also full stack programmers, who can work fluently from low level to high level using any language, and best ones know business and processes too. For this reason, working on higher level and solving problems top-down is associated to trait of good programmers.
And for using Javascript... well, it is horrible language. Just like english. Nevertheless, I write the comments and name the functions using english vocabulary and not use some "better" language.
For very same reason as I use english, I often write code using Typescript using NestJS framework. It mitigates some javascript issues even though it's down there.
i think many of the smartest people have a hard time understanding that being smart is only partly a choice. also there will always be many mediocre of anything because you see excellence (or mediocrity) purely through difference in skill. so basically when someone says "there are many mediocre programmers", they say "i see many people making decisions i dont agree with" (irrespective, if they can be shown to be correct).
Mediocre actually means in the middle
And there's a whole lot of bad in the middle. For example a lot of people in the middle eat mcdonalds. Yuck! Food analogy
yes but for me to get a job to do interesting things i have to grind away at a mediocre one at first so i have experience on my resume that literally every fucking position with a little bit of skill requires. its a shit market. id happily work as a low level engine programmer but guess what? you need fucking credentials for that too
JavaScript is a flawed toy language, if web developers had been smart they would have ditched HTML/CSS/JavaScript for the benefit of a sandbox machine code for online usage, and webapp would basically be a sandboxed EXE binary or ELF binary in sandbox mode, it would have been like making a native system program but for internet.
There is webassembly.
@@gruntaxeman3740 WASM is just patchwork on top of the already huge browser stack. You can't use WASM to draw directly to a browser viewport without a javascript shim. Maybe someday we'll see a general purpose sandboxed WASM runtime that points to a URL and runs the result.
@@1e0isfdkorblpg I totally agree, for sending hypertext documents. However most "websites" are a hack around html and css to provide a full application. If we separate application functionality into a lightweight sandboxed runtime, we could see actually performant internet-based programs that don't need the "web stack". Say, compiling a C program to some intermediate representation that can be ran by entering a URL. Of course HTTP would not be appropriate anymore, but you get the idea.
Every programming language is flawed. What you said was tried with ActiveX and security was disastrous.
Idea of web is to be accessible, so everything that is not remotely human readable is not option. Also there should be no dependency to CPU architecture. ActiveX was tried and that failed.
Google actually tried to put Dart VM to browser but that didn't catch on. Mozilla was afraid that would just add fragmentation and break compatibility we now have, and most likely Apple would not have accepted either.
Javascript strength is that it works.
The tool doesn't matter, only what you do with it.
is this the guy that cried bc soulja boy didnt "get" his game?
he's a clown that exists to make us laugh. enjoy it.
Usually best programmers are application programmers and application UI is usually done using browser engine. That means that best programmers compile part of the software for Javascript.
Please don't say horrendous things like that.
@@brianviktor8212 I hope it was some twisted joke and we were all supposed to laugh at the absurdity of it 🥹
Electron app goes "I am eating all of your RAM".
Bro...