@hatcat01.bsky.social

Gamedev, singing, writing, teaching, husbanding, parenting

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

I believe in progress! @PSB_HQ

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

@AnneSpooky down the front tonight in Brighton? Looking forward to the glitter bomb…

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

"The machines will do the heavy work, and men will supervise the machines."

@PSB_HQ is it my imagination or is this the third consecutive outing for this sample?

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

@AbigailDombey @betateachpod @PeterEastern @TrystanLea @Protons4B @Zarch1972 @alexbut Nothing new to add here. Still loving my M3!

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

Honestly, I’m going to be pushing this stance on AI until you all realise it’s Eliza on steroids.

https://t.co/NObs0qomb6

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

I have a hunch that a lot of AI commentators haven't studied any epistemology. It would be a great idea if you did so </sarcasm>. My first text on the matter was Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology by https://t.co/QKvvTpB27I and it's still a great read.

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

historically, men in this situation used a folding canopy called an umbrella

[Shehab Khan @ShehabKhan]

If you’re wondering how prepped Conservative HQ is for the election - I’m told they were ringing round prospective candidates yesterday trying to fill constituencies which don’t yet have a confirmed Tory candidate

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

You know, nothing gives me greater crowd joy than harmony. It’s next level stuff.

[Calgie @christiancalgie]

American artists often seem shocked at how good British audiences are at group singing. This from Elbow’s concert in Manchester last night proves that school assemblies where kids sing together must never be abandoned

[Daniel Lemire @lemire]

Learning from the object-oriented mania

Back when I started programming professionally, every expert and every software engineering professor would swear by object-oriented programming. Resistance was futile. History had spoken: the future was object-oriented.

It is hard to understate how strong the mania was. In education, we started calling textbooks and videos ‘learning objects‘. Educators would soon ‘combine learning objects and reuse them‘.

A competitor to a client I was working on at the time had written a server in C. They had to pay lip service to object-oriented programming, so they said that their code was ‘object-oriented.

I once led a project to build an image compression system. They insisted that before we even wrote a single line of code, we planned it out using ‘UML’. It had to be object-oriented from the start, you see.

You had to know your object-oriented design patterns, or you could not be taken seriously.

People rewrote their database engines so that they would be object-oriented.

More than 25 years later, we can finally say, without needing much courage, that it was insane, outrageous, and terribly wasteful.

Yet, even today, the pressure remains on. Students are compelled to write simple projects using multiple classes. Not just learn the principles of object-oriented programming, which is fair enough, but we still demand that they embrace the ideology.

To be fair, some of the basic principles behind object-oriented programming can be useful. At least, you should know about them.

But the mania was unwarranted and harmful.

The lesson you should draw is not that object-oriented is bad, but rather that whatever is the current trendy technique and trendy idea, is likely grossly overrated.

The social mechanism is constantly in action, though it is no longer acting for object-oriented programming. It takes many forms. Not long ago, you had to wear a mask to attend a conference. Everyone ‘knew’ that masks stopped viruses and had no side-effect… just like everyone just knew that object-oriented programming makes better and more maintainable software, without negative side-effects.

You can recognize such a social contagion by its telltale signs.

Rapid Spread: A social contagion spreads quickly through a group or community, much like a wildfire. One day everyone is talking about the latest object-oriented pattern, and the next day, everyone is putting it into practice.
Amplification: You often observe the emergence of ‘influencers’, people who gain high social status and use their newly found position to push further the hype. The object-oriented mania was driven by many key players who made a fortune in the process. They appeared in popular shows, magazines, and so forth.
Peer Influence: Social contagion often relies on peer influence. E.g., everyone around you starts talking about object-oriented programming.
Conformity: People often mimic the behaviors or attitudes of others in their group, leading to a conformity effect. People who do not conform are often excluded, either explicitly or implicitly. For example, object-oriented started to appear in job ads and was promoted by government agencies.
Aggressive Behavior: You see a significant change from usual behavior as irrationality creeps in. If you criticize object-oriented programming, something is wrong with you!
Grandiose Beliefs or Delusions: Claims that object-oriented programming would forever change the software industry for the better were everywhere. You could just easily reuse your objects and classes from one project to the other. Never mind that none of these claims could ever be sustained.
Risky Behavior: Entire businesses bet their capital on projects trying to reinvent some established tool in an object-oriented manner. People kept throwing caution to the wind: let us rebuild everything the one true way, what is the worse that can happen?

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

@fenbf @gregcons This remains my favourite review of our book. Many thanks for your kind words! Be advised that I am working on a new volume, The Game Developers Guide To Learning C++: I hope you appreciate it just as much!

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

Hello #gamedev engineering! This is your reminder that you have one week to submit your talk to the @CppCon GameDev track. Come to Colorado and network with your peers! Speaker sponsorship available! I hope to see you there; it's going to be excellent!
https://t.co/LE7t8oYENI

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

@MichaelCaisse Being able to identify most of the people there?

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

I like supporting podcasters, and here's part of one I did recently, where I conjured a big chunk of my knowledge about memory management from recall on the fly. One glaring error at the start where I say automatic storage happens on the heap... sigh...

[Łukasz | Wookash Podcast @wookash_podcast]

Carved out a highlight, where legendary @hatcat01 speaks on memory management - love it!

https://t.co/sF69RGkqRU

:))))))

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

@gdcon “Don’t make sure to attend”? Ermmm…

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

@ninkibah Believe it or not, this choir recorded that advert.

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

The Royal Festival Hall, where I will be singing the Carmina Burana this afternoon.

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

Neither of you are actually Jarvis Cocker, are you… anyway, I hope he got a tenth of the pleasure he’s given me over the years.

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

@jarviscocker Of course, I mean @JarvisCocker1 - sorry chaps, bet that happens a lot…

[@hatcat01.bsky.social @hatcat01]

Singing in a moment. @jarviscocker is in the audience. Hope he likes it.

Hope EVERYONE likes it. The place is sold out.