Quote:Original post by Nytegard
I actually think programmers are getting worse overall...
The better compilers are making people more lazy. The more memory and hard disk are making people lazier. Trying to create a game with a 4 MHz processor and 32KB of RAM & 64 KB of diskspace on a slow access tape is completely different than with a 2 GHz processor and over 2 GB of RAM and gigabytes of diskspace (at 7200+ RPM/sec).
I agree with this. I think that as hardware has gotten better, programmers have become sloppier. I remeber back when WarCraft II came out, one of the best things that I liked about it had nothing to do with the gameplay itself. It was simply the fact that it required only an 80MHz processor to run (that was back when the stadard was 200MHz). These guys wrote tight, efficient code. These days, there are games which require a 2.8GHz processor, 64MB of VRAM and they still run like molasses. Where the programmers aiming too high or did they not program efficiently?
The one thing that I am really afraid about is that as we get farther from the low-level details, programmers will have a smaller understanding of the underlying principles that make these tools work. It is my opinion that if one wants to be really good at anything, one needs to not only know that something works but how it works as well.