> abstraction being excessively glorified (mostly) by academics and formal CS curricula.
It's not just academics, it's many developers, too.
We're in an old-school thread. We like what's really going on. Hang out in the Web Starter Kit from last night though, and you'll find tons of people who glorify abstraction.
The reality is that competing forces spread out the batter in different directions: the abstractionists write Java-like stuff. The old-schoolers exploit subtle non-linearities.
Actual commercial shipments rely on a complex "sandwich" of these opposed practices.
> Demoscene is all about creative, pragmatic ways to solve problems
Yes and I grew up with the demoscene (c64 and amiga 500) and it's also about magic, misdirection, being isolated for long winters and celebrating a peculiar set of values. Focus is shifted toward things that technologists know are possible, such as tight loops running a single algorithm that connects audio or video with pre-rendered data, not on what people want or need, such as CAD software or running mailing lists. Flexibility, integration and portability are eschewed in favor of performance.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the demoscene - it's the path that got me to love music. And I have near-total apathy for functional programming. I only code in Javascript when weapons are pointed at my heart, but with the proper balance, there are some very real reasons to make use of abstraction. It's not just academics, it's people solving real problems. The trick is to act strategically with respect to the question: which parts will you optimize and which parts will you offload to inefficient frameworks?
It's not just academics, it's many developers, too.
We're in an old-school thread. We like what's really going on. Hang out in the Web Starter Kit from last night though, and you'll find tons of people who glorify abstraction.
The reality is that competing forces spread out the batter in different directions: the abstractionists write Java-like stuff. The old-schoolers exploit subtle non-linearities.
Actual commercial shipments rely on a complex "sandwich" of these opposed practices.
> Demoscene is all about creative, pragmatic ways to solve problems
Yes and I grew up with the demoscene (c64 and amiga 500) and it's also about magic, misdirection, being isolated for long winters and celebrating a peculiar set of values. Focus is shifted toward things that technologists know are possible, such as tight loops running a single algorithm that connects audio or video with pre-rendered data, not on what people want or need, such as CAD software or running mailing lists. Flexibility, integration and portability are eschewed in favor of performance.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the demoscene - it's the path that got me to love music. And I have near-total apathy for functional programming. I only code in Javascript when weapons are pointed at my heart, but with the proper balance, there are some very real reasons to make use of abstraction. It's not just academics, it's people solving real problems. The trick is to act strategically with respect to the question: which parts will you optimize and which parts will you offload to inefficient frameworks?