Another patron post! IndustrialRobot asks:

You should totally write about drawing/image manipulation programs! (Inspired by https://eev.ee/blog/2015/05/31/text-editor-rundown/)

This is a little trickier than a text editor comparison — while most text editors are cross-platform, quite a few digital art programs are not. So I’m effectively unable to even try a decent chunk of the offerings. I’m also still a relatively new artist, and image editors are much harder to briefly compare than text editors…

Right, now that your expectations have been suitably lowered:

A sponsored post from an anonymous patron:

I would kinda like to hear about any thoughts you have on technical teaching or technical writing. Pedagogy is something I care about. But I don’t know how much you do, so feel free to ignore this suggestion :)

Good news: I care enough that I’m trying to write a sorta-kinda-teaching book!

Ironically, one of the biggest problems I’ve had with writing the introduction to that book is that I keep accidentally rambling on for pages about problems and difficulties with teaching technical subjects. So maybe this is a good chance to get it out of my system.

Nova Dasterin asks, via Patreon:

How about do something on networking code, for some kind of realtime game (platformer or MMORPG or something). :D

Ah, I see. You’re hoping for my usual detailed exploration of everything I know about networking code in games.

Well, joke’s on you! I don’t know anything about networking.

Wait… wait… maybe I know one thing.

This month, IndustrialRobot asked my opinion of FOSS game engines — or, more specifically, why I chose LÖVE.

The short version is that it sort of landed in my lap, I tried it, I liked it, and I don’t know of anything I might like better. The long version is…

Ah, C. The best lingua franca we have… because we have no other lingua francas. Linguae franca. Surgeons general?

C is fairly old — 44 years, now! — and comes from a time when there were possibly more architectures than programming languages. It works well for what it is, and what it is is a relatively simple layer of indirection atop assembly.

Alas, the popularity of C has led to a number of programming languages’ taking significant cues from its design, and parts of its design are… slightly questionable. I’ve gone through some common features that probably should’ve stayed in C and my justification for saying so. The features are listed in rough order from (I hope) least to most controversial. The idea is that C fans will give up when I call it “weakly typed” and not even get to the part where I rag on braces. Wait, crap, I gave it away.

Zed Shaw, of Learn Python the Hard Way fame, has now written The Case Against Python 3.

I’m not involved with core Python development. The only skin I have in this game is that I like Python 3. It’s a good language. And one of the big factors I’ve seen slowing its adoption is that respected people in the Python community keep grouching about it. I’ve had multiple newcomers tell me they have the impression that Python 3 is some kind of unusable disaster, though they don’t know exactly why; it’s just something they hear from people who sound like they know what they’re talking about. Then they actually use the language, and it’s fine.

I’m sad to see the Python community needlessly sabotage itself, but Zed’s contribution is beyond the pale. It’s not just making a big deal about changed details that won’t affect most beginners; it’s complete and utter nonsense, on a platform aimed at people who can’t yet recognize it as nonsense. I am so mad.

You may have noticed that I like comparing features across different languages. I hope you like it too, because I’m doing it again.

Ever since writing that one post about PHP, I’ve had a steady trickle of people ask me to write a similar post for other languages or platforms. The most common request by far is JavaScript.

Well, I’ve finally done it. Here you go: the horror story that is JavaScript.

I’ve now made a few small games. One of the trickiest and most interesting parts of designing them has been making them accessible.

I mean that in a very general and literal sense. I want as many people as possible to experience as much of my games as possible. Finding and clearing out unnecessary hurdles can be hard, but every one I leave risks losing a bunch of players who can’t or won’t clear it.

I’ve noticed three major categories of hurdle, all of them full of tradeoffs. Difficulty is what makes a game challenging, but if a player can’t get past a certain point, they can never see the rest of the game. Depth is great, but not everyone has 80 hours to pour into a game, and it’s tough to spend weeks of dev time on stuff most people won’t see. Distribution is a question of who can even get your game in the first place.

Here are some thoughts.

I have a teeny tiny pet peeve with dialogue boxes. Er, not dialog boxes — dialogue boxes, the ones in video games with scrolling lines of dialogue.

I recently wrote a dialogue box, and I saw a game that made this mistake, so here’s a post about it.

I’ve been dipping my toes into Doom mapping again recently. Obviously I’ve done it successfully once before, but I’m having trouble doing it a second time.

I have three major problems: drawing everything too small, drawing everything too rectangular, and completely blanking on what to do next. Those last two are a bit tricky, but struggling with scale? That sounds like a problem I can easily solve with charts and diagrams and math.

In the beginning, there was ZZT. ZZT was a set of little shareware games for DOS that used VGA text mode for all the graphics, leading to such whimsical Rogue-like choices as ä for ammo pickups, Ω for lions, and ♀ for keys. It also came with an editor, including a small programming language for creating totally custom objects, which gave it the status of “game creation system” and a legacy that survives even today.

A little later on, there was MegaZeux. MegaZeux was something of a spiritual successor to ZZT, created by (as I understand it) someone well-known for her creative abuse of ZZT’s limitations. It added quite a few bells and whistles, most significantly a built-in font editor, which let aspiring developers draw simple sprites rather than rely on whatever they could scrounge from the DOS font.

And then…

And then, nothing. MegaZeux was updated for quite a while, and (unlike ZZT) has even been ported to SDL so it can actually run on modern operating systems. But there was never a third entry in this series, another engine worthy of calling these its predecessors.

I think that’s a shame.

Sometimes, I lie awake at night thinking about programming languages.

That’s all the intro I’ve got here, sorry. I felt like writing about the switch statement for some reason.

Not music nerds, obviously.

I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it.

The rest has always seemed completely, utterly arbitrary. Why do we have twelve notes, but represent them with only seven letters? Where did the key signatures come from? Why is every Wikipedia article on this impossible to read without first having read all the others?

A few days ago, some of it finally clicked. I feel like an idiot for not getting it earlier, but I suppose it doesn’t help that everyone explains music using, well, musical notation, which doesn’t make any sense if you don’t know why it’s like that in the first place.

Here is what I gathered, from the perspective of someone whose only music class was learning to play four notes on a recorder in second grade. I stress that I don’t know anything about music and this post is terrible. If you you so much as know how to whistle, please don’t read this you will laugh at me.

I love having tests.

I hate writing them.

It’s tedious. It’s boring. It’s hard, sometimes harder than writing the code. Worst of all, it doesn’t feel like it accomplishes anything.

So I usually don’t do it. I know, I know. I should do it. I should also get more exercise and eat more vegetables.

The funny thing is, the only time I see anyone really praise the benefits of testing is when someone who’s really into testing extols the virtues of test-driven development. To me, that’s like trying to get me to eat my veggies by telling me how great veganism is. If I don’t want to do it at all, trying to sell me on an entire lifestyle is not going to work. I need something a little more practical, like “make smoothies” or “technically, chips are a vegetable”.

Here’s the best way I’ve found to make test smoothies. I’ll even deliberately avoid any testing jargon, since no one can agree on what any of it means anyway.

The web is a great thing that’s come a long way, yadda yadda. It used to be an obscure nerd thing where you could read black Times New Roman text on a gray background. Now, it’s a hyper popular nerd thing where you can read black Helvetica Neue text on a white background. I hear it can do other stuff, too.

That said, I occasionally see little nagging reminders that the web is still quite primitive in some ways. One such nag: it has almost no way to preserve attribution, and sometimes actively strips it.

As a programmer, I’m here to propose some technical solutions to this social problem. It’s so easy! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

I’ve been trying really hard not to be a sourpuss about this, because everyone seems to enjoy it a lot and I don’t want to be the jerk pissing in their cornflakes.

And yet!

Despite all the potential of the game, despite all the fervor all across the world, it doesn’t tickle my fancy.

It seems like the sort of thing I ought to enjoy. Pokémon is kind of my jam, if you hadn’t noticed. When I don’t enjoy a Pokémon thing, something is wrong with at least one of us.