I find it curious, but perhaps inevitable, that someone like John Carmack requires this introduction. If you played videogames in the 90s / early 00s or were at all interested in 3D programming, it was impossible not to have heard of him. He was (is?) probably one of the cleverest programmers of his time.
This article of his gets reposted time and time again to HN, which makes sense because it's very interesting. This is the first time I've noticed people not knowing who the author was.
I wonder if a few decades from now, tech-minded people will wonder who Linus Torvalds, Brian Kernighan or Dennis Ritchie were. I suppose they will!
I don't think it's uncommon for people to learn from the top down and after some time and a bit if passion find themselves digging into the roots of it.
It came across as a tad condescending although I can easily believe it wasn't meant that way and you are just open mindedly sharing perspective as is the point of all this.
I reply not to just make that comment but actually to recommend a book (that many may have possibly already read) which gives a rich history well worth it.
While I knew of Carmack and Torvalds, I only recently read a bit about Kernighan and Ritchie. And that was only because I got roped into doing some maintenance on a rather old system, programmed in C, which used a syntactic style that I hadn't encountered before. A bit of research on some of the structures I saw lead me to pre-ISO standardization of the C language, where the closest thing to a standard was a book written by those two, and the resulting pseudo-standard referred to as K&R C.
I bailed out of that project as soon as humanly possible, by the way. Not just because of the ancient language, but the entire organizational structure of both the codebase and the team itself.
I find it curious, but perhaps inevitable, that someone like John Carmack requires this introduction. If you played videogames in the 90s / early 00s or were at all interested in 3D programming, it was impossible not to have heard of him. He was (is?) probably one of the cleverest programmers of his time.
This article of his gets reposted time and time again to HN, which makes sense because it's very interesting. This is the first time I've noticed people not knowing who the author was.
I wonder if a few decades from now, tech-minded people will wonder who Linus Torvalds, Brian Kernighan or Dennis Ritchie were. I suppose they will!