It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.I am betting against, and John is betting for. I have another long-term bet: I bet @codinghorror $10k that

It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.I am betting against, and John is betting for. I have another long-term bet: I bet @codinghorror $10k that

25 Nov 2007 The Two Types of Programmers Contrary to myth, there aren't fourteen types of programmers. There are really only two, as Ben Collins-Sussman reminds us. There are two "classes" of programmers in the world of software development: I'm going to call them the 20% and the 80%. The 20% folks are what many would call "alpha" programmers -- the leaders, trailblazers, trendsetters, the kind of

11 Feb 2009 The Ferengi Programmer There was a little brouhaha recently about some comments Joel Spolsky made on our podcast: Last week I was listening to a podcast on Hanselminutes, with Robert Martin talking about the SOLID principles. (That's a real easy-to-Google term!) It's object-oriented design, and they're calling it agile design, which it really, really isn't. It's principles for how to d

07 Feb 2009 Don't Reinvent The Wheel, Unless You Plan on Learning More About Wheels The introduction to Head First Design Patterns exhorts us not to reinvent the wheel: You're not alone. At any given moment, somewhere in the world someone struggles with the same software design problems you have. You know you don't want to reinvent the wheel (or worse, a flat tire), so you look to Design Patterns

29 Jan 2009 The Sad Tragedy of Micro-Optimization Theater I'll just come right out and say it: I love strings. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a problem that I can't solve with a string and perhaps a regular expression or two. But maybe that's just my lack of math skills talking. In all seriousness, though, the type of programming we do on Stack Overflow is intimately tied to strings. We're c

It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.I am betting against, and John is betting for. I have another long-term bet: I bet @codinghorror $10k that

[Update: This is a technical article on the causes of lag.  If you want the article on measuring lag, then click here] Responsiveness is something that can make or break a game at first impression. This is especially true in reviews where a game with poor responsiveness will be described as being “sluggish”, “unresponsive”, “floaty” or “sloppy”. A better game might be referred to as “tight” or “r

It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice: By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.I am betting against, and John is betting for. I have another long-term bet: I bet @codinghorror $10k that

RELATIONAL DATABASES Relational Databases are sometimes viewed as being in the domain of business applications and web development. You would use a relational database for boring applications such as inventory, accounting, or implementing a shopping cart system for a commercial web site. Databases can be viewed by game-programmers as old-fashioned, large, slow, and replete with imponderable termin