> Write your code for this game only - not for a future game. You’re going to be writing new code later because you’ll be smarter.
This really stood out for me. I'm always tempted, while writing something specific, to generalize it. I try to resist that, when I recognize it. Writing a ThingThatImWritingFramework risks ThingThatImWriting never seeing the light of day, or never being used.
It completely removes the fun though, if you only enjoy generalizing, optimizing, refactoring, designing, and take zero pleasure in delivering an actual usable product. If the product is Doom this shouldn't be a problem - but for most of us the product is form validation or calculations involving plywood. Making frameworks and generalization is the only reason I manage to keep doing what I do. (I'm exaggerating somewhat, but I think this is a clear distinction between two kinds of programmers those who love the code; and the craft, and those who like making products. Have too many of one kind and you'll ship a mess. Too many of the other and you'll never ship)
Generalisation is always needed in a code base. However, only generalise pieces that you actually use in your code. YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It) is a great principal. You should follow it -- until you need it. Then, of course, do what you need to do.
People often think that projects get slower as code is added. However, the systems we work with are dramatically more complex and based on more pre-existing code than ever before. Because that pre-existing code has been generalised out, we can write new code easily and quickly.
There are two situations that you need to think about wrt to this issue (IMHO). If someone needs to do something that you have already done in your project, it should be simple and obvious how to do it. The more often something needs to be done, the more simple and obvious it needs to be. However, if someone needs to do something that hasn't been done before (even if it is is very much related to what already exists), then all doors should be open. The code should not imply how new work should be done. It definitely shouldn't try to guess what you want to do and do it before you get there.
I hate writing boilerplate and I'd rather have pineapples shoved up my behind than write code of the kind that should be in the freaking standard library.
This is what always bugged me about java. I'm only just above a beginner, but it seems to me that in 2017 you shouldn't have to write so much crap just to read from a file.
There is - but there is no good reason to not have good naming plus also a simple wrapper to do the most common cases. That the IO framework is very general is good, but that you need tons of boilerplate for a common scenario is bad. C#
var txt = File.ReadAllText("file.txt");
This is exactly the abstraction you want if you want to read a (whole) text file. The point of abstractions is to pick the right one. For IO it's likely best to have many layers of abstraction so you can choose the simple top level function or use a more complex one when needed.
I'm sure there is something similar in Java these days too. Would be a huge mistake to not have simple IO helpers to the std library.
I have seen projects drown to death in a sea of frameworks, supposedly reusable libraries and generalizations developers deemed necessary. But it was fun for some, I am sure.
I've seen projects fail for a variety of reasons. A few fall under scenario you described. But, I've also seen quite a few projects succeed by making use of in-house developed libraries and frameworks. It probably more depends on who is on the team than whether or not the code is written to be generic enough to apply to other problems.
No doubt that's often the case. And depending on which type of programmer you have too many of, it might be failing for that reason or the opposite (insufficient generalization).
If you ever think "we are on schedule and this codebase has just the right balance between getting things done and doing it right" then you have a well composed team.
Generalise to the simplest expression of the logic of your application. Don't generalise towards the expression of the logic of all future applications.
The article kind of already says this:
> Keep your code absolutely simple.
> Keep looking at your functions and figure out
> how you simplify further.
>It completely removes the fun though, if you only enjoy generalizing, optimizing, refactoring, designing, and take zero pleasure in delivering an actual usable product.
Then maybe that programmer should go into teaching instead?
nope, I've delivered considerable value to my team by essentially letting the people who enjoy shipping end user features do that, and extracting frameworks and libraries so that the overall product stays coherent and easy to work with, or occasionally stepping in and saying "why don't you let me build the general pieces for this feature first, and then you can use them to make your life easier". as long as you have a decent feel for yagni, it's a useful role to play.
if teaching earned me as much as a commercial programming job, then yes. Unfortunately, most teaching positions are fairly poorly paid (compared with the qualifications required and the opportunity cost). That's a sad fact, but one has to consider it.
People who enjoy actually building and shipping something instead of creating abstractions should go into management?
You do realize that this includes all the hackers with the original sense of the term, which are not about finely tuned abstractions and design patterns, but about creating things and hacking/kludging it out to get there faster?
"...only enjoy generalizing, optimizing, refactoring, designing, and take zero pleasure in delivering an actual usable product"
Too many projects suffer immensely because of people who don't give a shit about delivering.
In that mode, anything is an excuse: we need to reactor, we need to build a better framework, we need to revisit the requirements, etc.
Then real progress gets slowed down because of some ill fitting development philosophy that some of those folks pulled out of their asses.
What you need are wise programmers that care about delivering product, wise enough to balance long term maintenability and code health with actual delivery schedule.
Of course I take some pleasure in delivering products, and I try very hard to not over engineer or over generalize. I take pleasure in it, that doesn't (necessarily) mean I overdo it.
But if the job didn't have those elements I wouldn't be in it - and our product would be suffering from that too.
I thought I was the only one. Thanks for taking off a load of guilt. It's okay to enjoy this stuff. Very sage comment. Never finish because of the fun of building.
Exactly. e.g. it might be much easier (for some) to come up with a finished product/Game with Unity, with mouse clicking here and there... But it takes away all the fun of game development. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure it is hell a lot of fun working on Unity itself... So all the sweet is for their in-house devs :) (Same goes for Rails, Node, .NET, etc...)
This is basically the Mythical Man Month in a few lines.
You once wrote something specific, and it was great. Then you had to write a second thing, and you remember things from the first, so why not make it more general for the inevitable 3rd, 4th, 5th to come? And, then, you fail to deliver the 2nd.
Generalizing is part of how you'll be smarter later though. You cannot generalize something unless you understand its essence.
It's easy to confuse abstraction (choosing to deal with one, possibly newly contrived, concept over another) and generalization (reducing the number of concepts required to explain something to a minimum). The former is like building a Haswell CPU from a description of 70s microcontroller architecture, whereas the latter is like trying to figure out what CPUs were like in the 70s by looking at a Haswell core under a microscope.
> Write your code for this game only - not for a future game.
The quote refers to a future product, one that is very likely unspecified at best, and more likely just something that an individual contributor dreamed up. Unless we have some sort of multi-phase contract, how do we know we'll ever build another thing like this again?
Markets change, hardware changes, experience changes. Hell, building this thing may show you that you should never build another one like it.
Generalize where sensible inside the project, sure. But as the quote says, build what you're building, not what you're not.
It helps to allow yourself to be philosophical about what you're writing. Sometimes a generalization just moves around the problem. Sometimes the generalization you want competes badly against cut and paste.
Increasingly I try to find a strategy that transitions towards the generalization over time by following a path of "lower friction instead of greater friction." It's easy to increase friction by adding a new configuration step, new concepts and idioms that are discordant with the rest of the environment, and then the point of doing it gets lost - you don't want to pay for that overhead most of the time, you can't ship code that way.
Yeah, sometimes. And other times, the whole contract gets spent on a framework that only makes sense if there's another contract, and ... well, I guess that never happens anymore.
Didn't someone say premature generalization is the root of all evil?
There is a saying in game circles, either one writes a game engine or a game, as most studios tend to die spending the publisher's money build the next great engine.
Factories. I've got a codebase to work with using factories everywhere. Static arrays of them. Classes are given hardcoded enums and there's macro magic all over the palce to join classes to the factories that make them, and to generate all the factories in these static arrays of factories.
Sometimes the static array of factories contains a single factory. Creating a single item. No variation, no types, just one kind of one item.
If you know you're going to have to experiment a lot on some aspect of the game/product, it seems to make sense to isolate that part, removing the commonalities into some kind of framework (perhaps informal, jury-rigged, so you can iterate on just that aspect.
A bit like the Wright brothers building a wind tunnel, so they could experiment quickly with control systems.
But Id wrote some great games, so maybe I'm missing how they handled this aspect...
This really stood out for me. I'm always tempted, while writing something specific, to generalize it. I try to resist that, when I recognize it. Writing a ThingThatImWritingFramework risks ThingThatImWriting never seeing the light of day, or never being used.