Redkey @ Redkey @programming.dev

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As a half-joking response to this half-joking admission, I got started with the Usborne programming books as a kid, and they laid some excellent foundations for my later study. They're all available online for free these days, so grab an emulator and user manual for your 80s 8-bit home computer of choice, and dive in!

Similar concepts (i.e. connect to random strangers' devices when in close physical proximity, and trade mini profiles/trading tokens/whatever) have been done at least half a dozen times, both before and after Nintendo, but somehow they never seem to stick. Street Pass may have been the most successful iteration that I'm aware of. I think that it's hard to get critical mass. Users are excited at first when they set things up, but after a few days or weeks of not getting any hits, they tend to lose interest and turn the service off to save battery life.

According to promotional material, the 2021 VCS "Classic Controller" has a twistable joystick for paddle controller functionality. "Paddle" is the usual term for the rotary analog controller, which I think is what is meant by "dial controller"

OP must have a phone, tablet, or computer, since they're posting here; they could even just use that.

Thr34dN3cr0 wrote (14:12 5/17/2019):

Does anyone have a way to fix this in the latest version? I've been looking all day but none of the answers I've found work.

Thr34dN3cr0 wrote (14:48 5/17/2019):

nvm figured it out.

"If you wish to be a writer, write."

Epictetus delivered this burn over 1900 years ago.

Re: the Acceptance stage.

Years ago I worked at a family-run business with a good working environment. The staff were once told a story of how, earlier in the company's history, a manager made a mistake that caused the company a substantial monetary loss.

The manager immediately offered their resignation, but the owner said to them, "Why would I let you go now? I've just spent all this money so you could learn a valuable lesson!"

So yeah, generally, most managers' reaction to accidentally deleting vital data from production is going to be to fire the developer as a knee-jerk "retaliation", but if you think about it, the best response is to keep that developer; your data isn't coming back either way, but this developer has just learned to be a lot more careful in the future. Why would you send them to a potential competitor?

Yes, I think that most of us realized from some of the self-aware wording that this is a parody. But like many parodies it's a real trope taken to a silly extreme, so we're talking about users who fit that trope (including ourselves, sometimes!).

Oh hell, you gave me a PTSD flashback!

It's the late 90s. My mother suddenly discovers File Explorer on her refurbished commodity Wintel box and decides that all this messy clutter has to go. Never mind that the drive was 80% empty when delivered and I didn't expect her to come close to filling it before it was replaced. Fortunately I had already backed up everything that looked important or interesting.

One day she calls from the office, "I don't need this 'Windows' any more, do I?"

"What? Wait! Don't do anything!" I walk in and she's got C:/Windows highlighted and the cursor is hovering over "Delete".

"I already have Windows installed on this computer, so I don't need this any more, do I?" Spoken more as a statement than a question. It took several minutes of forced calm explanation to get her to accept that this "Windows" directory WAS the Windows that's installed on the machine. She still wasn't happy that she could see it in File Explorer, though. So untidy!

That XKCD reminds me of the case a year or three ago where some solo dev that no-one had ever heard of was maintaining a library that a couple of other very popular and major libraries depended on. Something somewhere broke for some reason, and normally this guy would've been all over it before most people even realized there had been a problem, but he was in hospital or jail or something, so dozens of huge projects that indirectly relied on his library came crashing down.

What upset me most was reading the community discussion. I didn't see a single person saying, "How can we make sure that some money gets to this guy and not just the more visible libraries that rely so heavily on his work?", even though the issue was obliquely raised in several places, but I did see quite a few saying, "How can we wrest this code out of this guy's hands against his will and make multiple other people maintain it (but not me, I'm too busy) so we don't have a single point of failure?"

I played this on the PS2 and it's s fantastic experience.

Interestingly, the PAL version (and probably the Japanese version, too) has content that wasn't in the NA version. There's an extra puzzle, a semi-hidden alternative "funny/happy" coda after the main ending if you play through a second time, and some extra in-game options that are unlocked after you finish the game for the first time, including understandable subtitles for ALL characters, even ones that are normally speaking an unknown language. I'm not sure if the hidden weapon you can get in the middle of the game becomes a light saber on the second playthrough in the NA version as it does in the PAL version, but it may.

This was before video streaming sites, so there were many arguments on forums about how these things are in the game, no they aren't you trolls, yes they are here's a picture, that's obviously fake... and so on. It was interesting that once people figured out that the NA and PAL versions were different, there was a vocal core of NA players still insisting that it was all fake for quite a long time afterward.

It's a persistent dynamic memory allocation that's accessed by multiple processes! :)

I'd argue that you do need to be good at math to be an effective programmer, it's just that that doesn't mean what a lot of people think it means. You don't need to know all the ins and outs of quadratics, integrals, and advanced trigonometry, but I think you do need to have a really solid, gut-level understanding of basic algebra and a bit of set theory. If you're the sort of person whose head starts to swim when you see "y=3x+2", you're going to find programming difficult at best.

This game is criminally unknown even in Japan. I first learned about it years ago and wish I had paid the high price to buy a copy then; now it sells for 10 times as much, and that's if you can even find a copy. It's the only game missing from my physical collection that I know I want.

I've tried a couple of times to get into it over the years, but the language barrier was always too high for me and broke immersion. Hopefully I and others can now give this game the attention that I think it deserves.

Edit: A link to the patch: https://www.romhacking.net/translations/7187/

There was already a Spanish patch a few years ago, as well.

Edit 2: And now it's been flagged as "noncompliant". I'm not sure what that means, but it's not available from that site for the moment.

Anyone who's interested in VR but doesn't want the high outlay or to commit to particular hardware just yet, and has any half-decent Android or iOS phone, should check out VRidge from RiftCat. It turns your phone into a Steam-compatible VR headset; just get one of those head-mounted phone holders and away you go.

VR controls can be an issue; the software lets you fake them with a standard game controller, but I haven't found any easy way to have full VR controls (real first-party VR controllers all seem to be tied to the headset, and third-party software that uses things like Wii remotes and Sony PS Move controllers seems complicated and fiddly). But for this EmuVR I don't think that VR controls are likely to be a sticking point.

EDIT: The VRidge site says that it supports iOS as well.

Whatever it may have become in later years, Alan Kay, who is often called "The Father of Object-oriented Programming", outlined the message-passing idea as the main concept he was driving at, originally.

He also says that he probably misnamed it.

Here's a discussion in which the man himself makes a (small) appearance: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/46592/so-what-did-alan-kay-really-mean-by-the-term-object-oriented

I am currently working on a game for the Atari 2600, and you just gave a good outline of my code. And I love it.

This game hasn't even been released yet. This is the patient gamers community. We're not patient because we're waiting for games to be released, we're patient because we don't buy games until months or years after their release.

I tend to agree. I think this attitude is something of a holdover from the early days of computer science, when of academics from all the other, existing fields, mathematicians were usually the best fit. Now that we have formal computer scientists, computer engineers, and software engineers, this is no longer the case.

In my experience, when someone from a purely mathematical background tries to program or explain something for programmers, they often (but not always, to be fair) insist vehemently on sticking to methods and algorithms that at best confuse the issue in a programming setting, and sometimes even run counter to how the computing hardware works, reducing performance. In these situations the rationale given is usually something along the lines of, "Listen, we mathematicians have been doing it this way for X hundred years, so that's the way it should be done!"