Lex Fridman: How to feel bad about your programming skills

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GUEST BIO:
Tony Fadell is an engineer and designer, co-creator of the iPod, iPhone, Nest Thermostat, and author of the new book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making.

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SOCIAL:

[silvercomic]

It was Rollercoaster Tycoon, and his name is Chris Sawyer. You should have him on.

[elnur]

I already feel bad every time I have to come up with a variable name, so I don't really need this

[TheAtticus]

I’ve been a professional software engineer for over six years now.

I still go “holy shit” whenever I hear about someone writing anything in assembly.

[Jacob-jgcd]

They guy who created Roller Coaster Tycoon is an absolute mad lad.

[jcrio]

It wasn’t just a construction game, RCT had a powerful physics engine that even take into account the weights of the people riding and would crash if the carriage is too heavy. Every customers in the park had name, mood and different behaviour. Sawyer coded it in assembly so that very complex game could run on a crap computer (remember it was distributed inside cereal box!!!). That said, compilers had that time weren’t performant so you could really have an edge coding in ASM. Today, unless you have a very specific low level task (or you simply want to better understand how computer works), there is much less upside using ASM because compilers do a very good job.

[RealNewsMMA]

I got that game from on a cereal box once.
That was the most joy I’d ever experienced from a box of cereal.
Something similar to the Pinball story, I remember on Halo 3, the “Forge” mode, where you could spawn into an empty space, and bring in all of the objects that appeared through the game to form your own map to play on. That was my favorite, forge mode, constructing and deconstructing to form my own map, sometimes with others. Good times.

[BadgerOff]

Man, Rollercoaster Tycoon is hands down one of the greatest games ever made. It's so simple, yet so complex. It's infinitely playable and utterly addictive, even now. Even though the graphics look terribly dated by modern standards, it doesn't matter. The graphics aren't what made that game special. It is STILL the gold standard in theme park builder games. I could still easily play that game for hours!

[Optimus]

This is how it used to be on the 80s on 8bit or 16bit computers. Most games were written in assembly, even though some things could still be written in C or partially. More were written in C in the 90s with the exception of the Rollercoaster Tycoon game. But assembly was still used at the important places. The factoid that RT was written 99% in assembly wouldn't be something that would shock coders of the 80s, maybe the early 90s coders would be like "cool, but was it necessary?". Doom which is quite CPU intensive and released at similar era as RT was still 99% C and tiny bits in assembly (I think the wall renderers, which part however got lost, I never saw it, as the open source release of Doom was the Linux version that was all C, that wall column renderer was replaced, but Carmack was talking about the assembly version in the original DOS version). But it wasn't a shocking fact just only later. People now look at C and think it's outdated or terrifying. They have become softer. Assembly is not that terrifying if you know what you are doing, but I admit it's 3-5x times faster and easier to write things in any high level language.

Assembly is cool if you retro-code for hobby on old systems. Or if you want to try something modern just to learn and see how things used to work. In modern system I prefer C/C++ but one could just be aware of performance. Today people are not aware of performance, there is no need for assembly in most cases, but the right mindset of not unnecessary writing underperforming code. We don't understand how fast modern PCs are and how much slower software is than it could be.

[msb]

One Of the things to keep in mind is the information explosion that has happened over last few decades. The computers have become so much more powerful, but also more complex. Today an avg person spends most of their time just deciding what to learn and what to skip.

[pippi]

As a gamer, we dont have anything close to the level of detail that was coded into rollercoaster tycoon. The thing ran so well, you could push your creativity to the limit and it was endlessly challenging. Games are not made with this level of love anymore, big business got a hold of the industry :/

[aliasalin]

I don't even feel confident to call it a skill

[MaXtreme]

We had to code an infra red sensor in assembly for a robotic competition back in engineering school. After a month of headache and thousands of code lines, the teacher agreed that our code should work and couldn't figure it out either so we bought a standard infra red sensor and never spoke of it ever again...

[SirCaco]

Man... RCT 2 was life in pixel form to me at the age of 13. There was something about it. Such incredible design, so charming, and the pride in having constructed and managed a successful amusement park in that game was a high that's not easy to reach.

[technofeeling]

Rct2 was one of my favorite games. Always played it with my sister and either I was playing and she was watching or the other way around. It was so magical as a kid

[jerrickapeters]

I remember playing that game 😅 also I really hope to see more episodes of you playing games or just solo episodes in general :)

[plaguedoctr]

Roller coaster tycoon is one of my favourite games of all time. It's beyond brilliant!

[NinjaRunningWild]

Back in the early 90s we wrote a good amount of the game in ASM. By 93 or so though, you only needed to optimize certain slow routines in it (EG - Dword memset) & almost everything else in C.

[LouisDuran]

I was already feeling bad then I heard here that someone wrote Pinball construction set in assembly. Thanks Lex! 🙂

[planetrift]

Yeah, we did everything in assembly back then.. I didn't switch to c and c++ until the mid 90's. And sometimes I still do things in assembly. And still work with games, and always will.

[ILoveMoms]

The thing with roller coaster tycoon is that it wasnt pure assembly, it was microsoft macro assembler and a small amount of c. I realize macro assemblers are still assembly but its assembly with *features* which makes things easier