Here's what I think about Carmack's comments ... (cribbed from "risso" on
Raging Bull)
>At first, as an IBM trained programmer, I do know how to write code and
make it work. Carmack is a programmer without discipline. He expects
code to fix itself. tha's why he crashed so much. The Mac OS expects code
that is written properly ahead of time, so that it does not crash. The Mac
OS does not allow for sloppy code writing. I do not know of any
programming school which will allow one to graduate, who writes code
that needs the OS to fix it! Carmack wants to write and forget. He is a
Doshead geek whom, unfortunately, Jobs needs right now to make an
impression on other game developers. The fact that some OSes are more
advanced in that area, and I am not sure Windoze is all that great, does
not mean a coder need not know what the OS requires in terms of how to
access memory, etc. It is like saying " I always drive in an empty parking
lot, and I hate driving on a two lane parkway. It is so restrictive."
We should all look at the games that run flawlessly on the Mac, and
BETTER, than their Windows counterparts(UNREAL is a great example), to
see that Carmack's comments are at best "light", despite his weight in
the gaming world. The fact that the Mac OS does not have protected
memory is not a reason that makes it difficult to write code for it. It just
makes sloppy programmers realize how much coding discipline they lack
in making it in a corporate programming world!
His other comments are just DOShead comments, which are just Yadda
yadda yadda......We've seen it before. Mac OS 8.6(see my post
yesterday) will be a good interim solution to multitasking performance.
Spec tests are biased by allowing up to FOUR libraries to be vendor
provided, and therefore highly tuned to make results look better on their
chip. This alone kills the objectivity of the test, whatever it is. Additionally,
no other test is totally accurate either.< |
