
We Tried Baseball and It Didn’t Work (2006) - drewfradette
http://xprogramming.com/articles/jatbaseball/
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fleitz
It's a sad but accurate reflection of reality, goes well with the TDD /
Dynamic programming articles earlier today.

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mattgreenrocks
Too bad it didn't get many comments. :(

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TillE
Amusingly, this actually still happens in the world of tabletop RPGs. Some
people will take a new game, throw out bits of it they think they won't like,
change some rules, and then tell you how it wasn't any good.

If the designers of a system have spent considerable effort testing and
refining it, then it should be taken as a whole, even if parts of it don't
make immediate sense. Again, all true for well-designed games. Even if you
don't understand the reason for a certain rule, following it can still have a
positive effect.

~~~
doorhammer
I was always a fan of GURPS for this reason; well, that and I think the
distribution of a 3D6 roll is pretty great.

You're given a pretty simple core, without much of any fluff (so lite you can
get it free [1]) and then you're free to add any number of source books to
your library to add more depth, or change the game more toward the direction
of your liking. You can even play in fully licensed environments with fully
licensed sourcebooks (like Vampire [2], etc).

I wouldn't say it's the perfect pen and paper RPG, and choosing the 'best' one
is probably even more subjective and flame-war-inspiring than picking the
'best' programming language, but it fits my philosophy of gaming pretty well.
I would say, though, that an RPG has a pretty direct goal to me, which is
having fun. I throw out what I want if I don't have fun with it. I think the
mistake is blaming the creators and saying it's stupid, which would just be
kind of silly. It just doesn't fit my paradigm. That said, I've played god-
knows how many pen and paper RPG's and I have a really good understanding of
which paradigms I do and don't like.

I think that's how I generally approach programming languages as well, though
I'm not as adept with programming as I am rolling a six sided die.

[1] [http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/lite/](http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/lite/)
[2]
[http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/vampirethemasquerade/](http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/vampirethemasquerade/)

(p.s. c.y.a. this is seriously not serious but kind of serious so ymmv)

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mattgreenrocks
I love this.

Articles like this are why you cannot trust industry to teach you programming.
They're too busy getting it wrong, then patting themselves on the back about
it.

