Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (English only)

I am not so sure. This is a handwavy advise I always hear from contemporary business wizbangs, but I don't think it is objectively or universally true. Pedantic, careful and attention to detail, perfectionist products that just work without things breaking all the time are a pleasure to use from the standpoint of the customer. Figure out the implementation details, funding, motivation, etc. as an entrepreneur - shipping broken products to paying customers is something that I only see in the software industry. You don't buy a vacuum cleaner and expect to send half of the missing screws to the customer 6 months later. Hell, just 20 years ago when you bought your SEGA game cassette, it shipped as a final product. Not to be patched ever. Once its out to the factory, if you found a bug, tough luck. Yes, this analogy has its limits, but silicon valley mentality of this startup hustle is questionable. I recommend watching this incredible talk (it's about software) : [this video]

I took a couple of compiler courses in university, and I think for the most part it made me a better programmer, mainly because it enforced understanding of how specific programming concepts and constructs are generally implemented. That, and a more intense look at the "heap of abstractions" you're generally working with when you write a higher-level language. I've always advocated that, if you want to really understand the tools you are using, you need to understand at least one level below the "surface abstraction" that you are working if. Even better if you can understand two or three levels down. There's a great talk from game developer Jonathan Blow [1] that describes how knowledge is lost "generationally" due to our lack of understanding of the black boxes we build things on top of. Not sure I 100% agree with his thoughts, but it's an interesting take. [1] [this video]

> I'd expect the bar to preserve any specific content to be a lot lower than what we had in the past. At the moment, I agree. However, as older civilizations rose and fell, their knowledge lived on in physical support, directly accessible by anyone who was taught how to read the language, therefore the assumption was that "as long as the language lives on, books are a good archiving support". When our modern digital civilization falls [1], I'm not sure most of it would be transmittable through long-term electronic archiving supports that may be easily readable (as easily as a written book at least) by future civilizations, because not only the language has to live on, but the technology needed to access the content also has to function. I also agree that some contents will always be more relevant to "backup". As for everything that happened on Facebook (same can be said for most social platforms), it is likely to entirely disappear with the company. One could even see it as a parallel civilization, that has no means of self-preservation other than that of their ruling entity's business interest. [1] Jonathan Blow - Preventing the collapse of civilization - [this video]

While not incompatible with ECS, the DOM and this renderer go all-in on the javascript event-loop. You would have to write your own run loop, which executes the systems on every frame (ideally creating a DAG and executing in parallel while possible), and leave the event loop behind, with all the niceties like `onClick`, to go full ECS. Otherwise you'll create some Frankenstein monster of part ECS, part event-loop, part declarative React. Additionally, you can throw OOP in that mix as well, because Three.js has it's own whole OOP-style framework, that you're strapping declarative React on top of with this renderer. Reminds me of Jonathan Blow's talk on the end of civilization via endless layers of abstraction[1]. I really think, when it's ready, a Bevy[2]-style system either native or compiled to WASM with WebGPU will be ideal. And while I'm airing opinions (forgive me), I think writing shaders now is like SQL 30 years ago. Developers left optimizing difficult--according to them--SQL to database administrators by abstracting it away into ORMs. If history is any indicator, I think we'll be having the same arguments on Hacker News 30 years from now about 3D frameworks vs writing shaders directly as we're having now about ORMs vs writing SQL directly. [1] [this video] [2] [link]

Well-known game developer Jonathan Blow has a lot to say about software and technology more generally being in decline due to skills being lost when older generations retire [1]. In my own experience, writing code with pointers in it used to be a skill expected of entry level programmers, and getting the hang of it was something of a rite of passage. Around the time Java started being used as a teaching language, it became best practice to rely on the language's standard libraries instead of rolling one's own linked list or whatever, and I instructed university students accordingly. As things have developed, the design effort put into Rust seems to imply that pointers are now regarded as a grand challenge problem. These days I don't tie my own neck ties any more but wear the clip-on kind because the knots have been developed and tested by experts. [1] [this video]