Carmack: "PS3 Better Than Anything... Except 360"

[MikeB]

Kynes said:

Iveyboi said:

kowenicki said:

he is allowed an opinion, like everyone else...

Exactly. This doesn't need to turn into a flame & console war.

The problem surges when someone tries to establish blatant propaganda as facts. MikeB, I'm pointing at you.

Well I will just quote Mike Acton then, an oldschool knowlegdeable programmer:

"Do you think that old programming practices have caused people to fall into bad habits that make working on modern architectures harder?

It's interesting, because I think that probably the oldest programming methods are the most relevant today. It's the habits over the last five or eight years that are struggling, and it's interestingly the people that are more recently out of school that are going to have the most trouble, because the education system really hasn't caught up to how the real world is, how hardware is changing and how development is changing.

The kinds of things that they're teaching specifically about software as it's own platform is teaching people to abstract things and make them more generic - treating software as a platform, whereas hardware is the real platform - but performance, and the low-level aspects of hardware, aren't part of the education system. People come in with a wrong-headed view on how to develop software. And that's the reason why Office 2007 locks up my machine for two minutes when I get an e-mail.

So you think universities should be putting more emphasis on parallel and heterogeneous processing?

I think we're finding that in the past couple of years universities have started to address parallel processing - MIT and Georgia Tech both have good programmes - so we're starting to see trends there on that. As far as low-level programming, yeah, I'd like to see that covered - you have a lot of people leaving school now who not only have never written any assembly but don't even understand how it works in general.

They use a high-level or compiled language, and it’s like a magic box to them. But it's something that as a professional programmer you should know - it should be part of the job description - and I think fundamentally what's missing is an understanding of hardware and how it works and how it fits into the programming ecosystem. So maybe what they should be blending is an electronic engineering degree along with a computer science course."

Certainly you don't honestly think yourself to be more knowledgeable on this subject than Mike Acton is? And I challenge any games programmer posting on VGChartz to claim otherwise!!