Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

Manu turkeyman at gmail.com
Sun Sep 1 07:32:06 PDT 2013


On 1 September 2013 19:57, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> wrote:

> On 2013-09-01 04:05, Manu wrote:
>
>  Naturally, this is primarily a problem with the windows experience, but
>> it's so frustrating that it is STILL a problem... how many years later?
>> People don't want to 'do work' to install a piece of software. Rather,
>> they expect it to 'just work'. We lost about 6 hours trying to get
>> everyone's machines working properly.
>> In the context of a 48 hour game jam, that's a terrible sign! I just
>> kept promising people that it would save time overall... which I wish
>> were true.
>>
>
> Was this only on Windows or were there problems on Linux/Mac OS X as well?


Well we never got OSX working (under mono-d), although this was mainly due
to supporting apple infrastructure in the end. I think we wrangled the
toolchain in the end, but never got everything linking; C++ dependencies
got complicated.
We eventually gave up, just wasting too much time, and he went off and did
the music/sounds for the game...

If you'd like to help me finish that OSX work we started together last
year, that'd be really great for next time! :)

 Getting a workable environment:
>>
>> Unsurprisingly, the Linux user was the only person happy work with a
>> makefile. Everybody else wanted a comfortable IDE solution (and the
>> linux user would prefer it too).
>>
>
> I can understand that.
>
>
>  IDE integration absolutely needs to be considered a first class feature
>> of D.
>> I also suggest that the IDE integration downloads should be hosted on
>> the dlang download page so they are obvious and available to everyone
>> without having to go looking, and also as a statement that they are
>> actually endorsed by the dlanguage authorities. As an end-user, you're
>> not left guessing which ones are good/bad/out of date/actually work/etc.
>>
>
> I completely agree.
>
>
>  Obviously, we settled on Visual-D (Windows) and Mono-D (OSX/Linux); the
>> only realistic choices available.
>>
>
> There's also DDT with Eclipse. It supports auto completion, go to
> definition, has an outline view and so on.


I've never met a C++ developer that likes Eclipse ;)
But I should probably check it out.

 The OSX user would have preferred an  XCode integration.
>>
>
> This one is a bit problematic since Xcode doesn't officially supports
> plugins. But it's still possible, as been shown by Michel Fortin with his D
> for Xcode plugin.
>
>  One more thing:
>> I'll just pick one language complaint from the weekend.
>> It is how quickly classes became disorganised and difficult to navigate
>> (like Java and C#).
>> We all wanted to ability to define class member functions outside the
>> class definition:
>>    class MyClass
>>    {
>>      void method();
>>    }
>>
>>    void MyClass.method()
>>    {
>>      //...
>>    }
>>
>> It definitely cost us time simply trying to understand the class layout
>> visually (ie, when IDE support is barely available).
>> You don't need to see the function bodies in the class definition, you
>> want to quickly see what a class has and does.
>>
>
> Sounds like you want an outline view in the IDE. This is supported by DDT
> in Eclipse. Even TextMate on Mac OS X has a form of outline view.


No, actually, as much as I keep banging on the IDE thing, in this case I
absolutely don't want help from the IDE, I just want to look at my page of
text, and be able to read a useful summary.
Can you give me any good reasons why fully defined functions polluting the
readability of a class definition could possibly be a good thing?
I just don't get it... why would you ever want to break up the nice summary
of what a class has&does, and why would you want to indent all of your
functions an extra few tab levels by default?

As a programmer, I spend a lot more time reading code than documentation,
and much of that time is spent reading it in foreign places like github
commit logs (limited horizontal space), diff/merge windows (hard to
distinguish class API changes vs function body changes at a glance, since
they're interleaved), even chat clients and communication tools. The IDE
can't assist in any of these contexts. If you have to have an IDE to read
your code, then something is really wrong.

...also, that implies you have good IDE integration, which is the a central
part of my entire rant! ;)
This argument is invalid until we have that, and at this point, it seems
much more likely we may be able to define methods outside the class scope
than have awesome IDE's.
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