Not sure if counting HTML, but it was my gateway to programming at the age of ~10-12. I found out I could make web pages in Word, then switched to FrontPage and learned HTML by watching and tweaking the code generated by the WYSIWYG editor. Good times!
Unrelated; but I always find myself drawn to game development, yet I have no desire to work in the industry. Does any other programmer feel the same, and do you know why?
Because games are fun, and programming is fun, and programming something that will be fun for other people is fun.
But the games industry is crowded, and highly profit-optimized, and you just instinctively know that getting a tour of the budget sausage factory wouldn't bring a true sausage lover any significant pleasure.
The games industry being crowded is a bit of a myth, though initially breaking into it does present a barrier. Lots of studios seem hungry for anyone with experience. Though, a lot of the actually interesting projects are crowded. Which is a real concern if that's the only type you want to work on (I'm in that camp...)
Like programming, once you have a few years under your belt, things really open up.
Really depends, if your a solid game dev and willing to work on the latest Barbie licensed mobile title its not so cutthroat. Profitable indie studio though? Good luck with that
I think I can sum it up in a Yogi-Berra-ism: The game industry is very industrialized. If you work on a commercial product, most of your effort goes towards making a product, and any specific details of the game are often a small part, one in a series of checklist features. And it's easy to dismiss assets when working on a little graphics demo, but the assets often take as much or more design insight than the code(which for most gameplay behaviors tends to boil down to finite state logic, timers, and lookup tables). What you most often get paid for as an industry employee is to churn out assets and simple behavioral scripts in quantity, so even though there are interesting problems at the top end of the field, you are probably not working on them for most production cycles, or only working on them for a short period.
As such, it's easy to tinker on a game and hyperfocus on a small aspect, but a different story to finish one in the way that most commercial games feel finished, both as software and in terms of filling in the blanks.
Just because you like painting doesn’t mean you’re interested in the art industry, or making a career out of it...
Gamedev pools together a large collection of backgrounds that makes development appealing to.. a lot of hobbies. And its also one of those subjects (some) users invest a lot of time into, both in playing and discussing, so its easy to feel you have the general knowledge of the outcome that its viable to create a “good” game; and particularly for programming, it crosses through a lot of domains — you can find reason to implement compilers, ML, graphics, a huge array of data structures, dynamic programming, any language paradigm (and any language), a full set of “patterns”, etc.
Tbh its harder to find reasons why a programmer-hobbyist wouldnt find something interesting in game development.
Its really easy to find reason you wouldn’t want to be in the industry (its an absolutely pathetic state of affairs)
I don't think luminous really compares to rails/django. Luminus is more like a great starting point, with some boilerplate and glue between libraries, while rails/django is way more batteries included.
I've always thought that hiring i.e. haskell developers would be easier than for more widely used languages like java and python as I've assumed that the talent-to-jobs ratio would be a lot higher. I actually have no idea though.
I know Python, Clojure, C#, Java and to some extent (not so modern) C++. Python and Clojure is what I use on a daily basis.
I'd love to learn Haskell, and I've actually started, but I've come to the realization that I should focus more on CS fundamentals instead of just hoarding languages.
