
Oculus Connect 2: Live Coding Session with John Carmack [video] - agronaut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs
======
kacy
I <3 John Carmack.

“you know my 11 year old son is programming in racket. my creative director is
programming in racket. it doesn’t seem that ridiculously complicated for me.”

------
neals
Here is a man thoroughly enjoying his work. I envy him, he just keeps on
coding while I feel myself floating away to management.

~~~
GuiA
A good manager enables happy programmers. We always need more good managers in
the world; there is nothing shameful about choosing to head into management.

Source: am a programmer, not a manager, but am lucky to currently be
experiencing an amazing programmer-turned-manager after years of awful
managers.

~~~
pcote
"Choosing" is the keyword tricky phrase here.

At my last job interview, the "what do you plan on doing 5 years from now?"
question came up. After talking up things that interested me that could fill 5
years of time, he asked me about management aspirations. I confessed that I
had no personal interest.

He followed with something about how he wished it was "realistic" for himself
to stay in non-managerial roles. Apparently, there are a lot of programmers
out there that feel some kind of pressure to move into management at some
point if they want to stay in the I.T. game.

~~~
pjmlp
Yes, even socially.

Maybe some fellow countryman would speak otherwise, but in Portugal if after
40 you are not a manager of some sort, it is like you failed at it.

It is also hard to avoid such situations when quite a few companies use senior
developer, technical lead or technical architect as synonyms for team manager.
So you only discovered what you really applied to, after being inside.

After a certain age if you want to stay in development it is like dodging
bullets.

------
vessenes
My daughter (age 10) has been programming in racket, and recently finished her
first game. I was super, super psyched to show her this, and super bummed to
read that it's been put off for some time now, with no news about launch;
looks like Carmack has had other things on his plate recently. I hope that
this gets launched; tying a scheme-type learner's language to VR output is
"epic" (her words) for junior developers.

~~~
vessenes
Update; he just told me he's been working on positional tracking for GearVR;
probably more important right now for Oculus. But, I'm still bummed! I would
love to mess around with this, and almost pulled the trigger on a GearVR
headset after watching the demo.

[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/696842361976926208](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/696842361976926208)

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zdam
Here are some rkt files if you are interested.

Key files are vr.rkt and remote.rkt

What is needed is the netHMD apk but I've not been able to find it.

[https://github.com/jb55/vrscript-samples](https://github.com/jb55/vrscript-
samples)

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AdmiralAsshat
John Carmack, the man arguably responsible for Windows' popularity as the
"gaming" OS, uses a Mac?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised given that id used to write their software on
NeXT computers, but still...

EDIT: Since the downvotes seem to assume I am leveling a criticism at him,
this is genuine surprise, not flame-baiting.

~~~
sitkack
Actually, he is responsible for graphics cards having to ship OpenGL drivers.
Without Quake, MS would have probably been successful in killing OpenGL on the
desktop.

~~~
pjmlp
MiniGL actually.

In the age of APIs like Glide.

Even if Microsoft cared about OpenGL, the API never had any love from console
and graphic card vendors in terms of tooling and support for game developers.

------
doctorpangloss
It's a little disappointing he had to go out and criticize how "media people"
used "Unity" to do these "simple things that game engines are total overkill
for." He was talking about the last VR conference, where artists, non-
programmers, etc. were showing their relatively straightforward panoramic
stills and videos with an Oculus powered by a Unity app.

That mentality sort of bodes poorly for Oculus. Of all things to say, why does
he have to open with, essentially, 'The people who are actually getting things
done and most excited about my platform are doing things wrong. I'm going to
tell them they're doing things wrong, and then I, who haven't released a game
people wanted to play in years, will show them how they should be doing
things.' It's the opposite of inspirational.

I know he's a phenomenal programmer and all. But he's such a blowhard. There
are lots of blowhards behind all sorts of platforms, but usually those
platforms have so much momentum that the platforms grow in spite of the
blowhards, not because of them. Nobody is using Oculus. Facebook really
nervous to specify the number that were sold. [0] And this guy right here
isn't helping.

And before you downvote me into oblivion, I'm mostly commenting on his
condescension. VRScript will be useful to someone, like many tools out there,
and I'm glad he's working on it. But his language like "media people" isn't so
easily ignored as an advocate for the platform and a representative of the
very best of engineering.

If you're at Facebook in charge of this stuff, you should take a close look at
this sort of rhetoric.

[0]
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/s1fo7069mbokcc0/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/s1fo7069mbokcc0/Screenshot%202016-01-27%2019.30.25.png?dl=0&preview=Screenshot+2016-01-27+19.30.25.png)

~~~
ticklemyelmo
"why does he have to open with, essentially, 'The people who are actually
getting things done and most excited about my platform are doing things wrong.
I'm going to tell them they're doing things wrong"

He's acknowledging that these people _had_ to do things wrong, at least in the
sense that they had climb a steep learning curve and deploy a heavyweight
system, because they basically had no other choice. He's describing the gap
that he saw that motivated what he demonstrated. Those artists aren't going to
be offended that he attacked their deep love of Unity, they're going to be
happy that they have an alternative that suits their needs.

~~~
doctorpangloss
> had to do things wrong

We differ in what we think is "wrong." I would say that your definition of
wrong is the least interesting to the people who are currently using Oculus
with e.g., Unity. They don't really care about the same things you do.

> had climb a steep learning curve

It's not that steep. I mean, they're not hardcore engineering types, and they
figured it out right?

> and deploy a heavyweight system

Is it that heavyweight? Does anyone really care that it's a 16 MB executable?
Did that get in the way of anything other than the App Store's arbitrary 50 MB
limit? Does performance really matter when you're drawing a panorama?

Define heavyweight. For many people, opening a command line is heavyweight.
You're not appreciating how nice Unity is.

> they're going to be happy that they have an alternative that suits their
> needs.

Time will tell. The history of art tooling is complicated. Maya nee
PowerAnimator has been around since 1990. Pixar, which thought it had a better
way of doing things with an alternative universe of tools, uses it now too.
Photoshop, MediaComposer, Flash, Unity... Everything has its own history and
its own outcomes.

I don't know if any of us are equipped to predict what is the right way to
develop for the platform. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying he's
being kind of a jerk and has a condescending attitude towards people who are
actually delivering things with Oculus.

~~~
lhl
Unity is a terrible solution for things like photo spheres and media tours:

* you can't load it without a long unity splash screen without paying $3K for a pro license

* it renders photospheres poorly - no dynamic eye buffer resolution or separate overlay compositor support

* based on your overall attitude/taking offense, I'm going to assume you haven't actually used Unity at all. Try to HTTP stream/lazy load web assets, go ahead. Also go ahead and try to build links in Unity, or to load JSON. (Hint, none of those are available out of the box). Now try to make changes/iterate, or distributing your changes to clients. Unity is a huge pita.

Honestly, I can't understand why you are arguing online about what's "wrong"
or not about something you obviously haven't tried and know nothing about.
Now, _that 's_ offensive.

