Amy Ko

He is also by his own admission still learning about programming: On the soft­ware devel­op­ment side, you know there was an inter­est­ing thing at E3, one of the inter­views I gave, I had men­tioned some­thing about how I’ve been learn­ing a whole lot, and I’m a bet­ter pro­gram­mer now than I was a year ago and the inter­viewer expressed a lot of sur­prise at that, you know after 20 years and going through all of this that you’d have it all fig­ured out by now, but I actu­ally have been learn­ing quite a bit about soft­ware devel­op­ment, both on the per­sonal crafts­man level but also pay­ing more atten­tion by what it means on the team dynam­ics side of things. https://blogs.uw.edu/ajko/2012/08/22/john-carmack-discusses-the-art-an…

He sort of alluded to it, but there's the usual perceived tooling/ retraining/hiring / performance ceiling issues for shops with > N devs, N somewhere between 5 and 25 (I don't agree with his arguments, just repeating them) http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_programming_i… http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/jap3x/im_very_tempted_to_want… http://blogs.uw.edu/ajko/2012/08/22/john-carmack-discusses-the-art-and…

I agree the next gen needs Math. Not for the reasons in this article, though. John Carmack's 2012 QuakeCon speech is almost a direct rebuke: https://blogs.uw.edu/ajko/2012/08/22/john-carmack-discusses-the-art-an… In real­ity in com­puter sci­ence, just about the only thing that’s really sci­ence is when you’re talk­ing about algo­rithms. And opti­miza­tion is an engi­neer­ing. But those don’t actu­ally occupy that much of the total time spent pro­gram­ming. You know, we have a few pro­gram­mers that spend a lot of time on opti­miz­ing and some of the select­ing of algo­rithms on there, but 90% of the pro­gram­mers are doing pro­gram­ming work to make things hap­pen. And when I start to look at what’s really hap­pen­ing in all of these, there really is no sci­ence and engi­neer­ing and objec­tiv­ity to most of these tasks. You know, one of the pro­gram­mers actu­ally says that he does a lot of mon­key programming—you know beat­ing on things and mak­ing stuff hap­pen. And I, you know we like to think that we can be smart engi­neers about this, that there are objec­tive ways to make good soft­ware, but as I’ve been look­ing at this more and more, it’s been strik­ing to me how much that really isn’t the case. Aside from these that we can mea­sure, that we can mea­sure and repro­duce, which is the essence of sci­ence to be able to mea­sure some­thing, repro­duce it, make an esti­ma­tion and test that, and we get that on opti­miza­tion and…