Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Chagen46]

The challenge lies within concepts, abstract stuff, and connecting all that stuff in your brain, before you write it down.

Quite similar to natural languages, if you ask me. The basic grammar takes only a few months for me to get--but it's the deeper things like idioms, slang, informal grammar, and the like, that are the truly hard part to learn.

[Sowelu]

I'm reviving this game.



Note that it's super early and nothing resembling playable, just a skeleton and a poor one at that.  Now that I haven't touched it in a while, I have enough context to fix the badly coded parts.  I'm building it with good network code from the ground up (instead of its previous complete lack thereof), and within a reasonably short amount of time (a few weeks), those consoles will be interactive.  Collision detection on the ship is currently terrible, and the single player flies around instead of walking; after about 2-4 months of work, I have a reliable plan to have multiple players on a single ship, walking around, and able to see each others' interactions with the ship consoles.

After that, development of gameplay in one of three directions.  1) ship-to-ship combat, 2) research/engineering projects, 3) exploring and finding planets.  All of those will take tons of work, well, the research projects not so much (since it's just one player playing a puzzle game for as long as they want, while their performance is tracked over long periods).

[Chagen46]

Something strange just struck me about programming langs.

If programs are written in programming languages....then what are the programming languages themselves written in?

[Sowelu]

Something strange just struck me about programming langs.

If programs are written in programming languages....then what are the programming languages themselves written in?

If English textbooks teach you English, then what language are they written in?  :P

[Skyrunner]

More seriously, they really are written in that language (or C or C++ or any other common language.)
In the end, though, they write to Machine Language. 0s and 1s as defined by the OS and/or hardware of your system.

[Chagen46]

Yeah, but...SOMEONE had to originally define what all that fancy stuff in, say, Python, like variables, does

(man, that sentence was awkward)

In the end, though, they write to Machine Language. 0s and 1s as defined by the OS and/or hardware of your system.

If I wanted to be a dick, I'd ask what machine language is written, but given how that would go down the slippery slope into a "chicken or the egg" paradox, I'll take your answer. Thanks!

[Skyrunner]

No, really, Machine Language is THE original language.
Or, more exactly, the circuits define what you could do. Think of Minecraft and its redstone. A certain machine code does a certain specific thing (or chain of things) defined in the processor.

Yeah, but...SOMEONE had to originally define what all that fancy stuff in, say, Python, like variables, does

That's defined in the compiler, which is most likely C++/C#/Cocoa/other code, which leads to my answer. I'm sure Wikipedia has a better explanation, even though it is Wikipedia.

[Mego]

Some languages that different compilers/interpreters are written in:

gcc: C (originally asm, but switched over)
g++: Mostly C, with some C++
Python (CPython): C
Python (PyPy): Python
PERL: C

Brainfuck: EVERY LANGUAGE IN EXISTENCE

[Skyrunner]

C++ (Code::Blocks, at least. Microsoft Visual Studio also.) compilers are written in C++. Eclipse (Java) was written in, surprisingly, Java.

[gebe]

C++ (Code::Blocks, at least. Microsoft Visual Studio also.) compilers are written in C++. Eclipse (Java) was written in, surprisingly, Java.

Eclipse is an IDE though. But javac, the Java compiler, is also written in Java.

edit: By the way, just on a side note, I study computational linguistics and from empirical observations I would say that the correlation between being a good linguist and a good programmer is about zero I work with some great linguists (NLP studies usually tend to be a crucible with people either coming from the field of linguistics or from CS) that have problems even grasping seemingly elementary programming concepts and in practice are awful programmers.

Of course there are brilliant linguists that are also brilliant programmers but it usually boils down to them being smart, hardworking people with a burning passion for both fields more than an inherent ability for learning any kind of language, be it natural or formal, just because they have studied linguistics. However you put it learning to program is absolutely nothing compared to learning a natural language and I would say the similarities (regarding the general learning experience) are few even though the jargon may sometimes overlap.

[Skyrunner]

Oops, confused front& backends xD

[kaijyuu]

If you trace all the compilers back, the first ones were written in assembly. Then new ones were written in the compilers written in assembly. Etcetera.

The first c++ compiler was written in a wacky offshoot of c, as I recall. Dunno about Java.

[Skyrunner]

I'd imagine Java was first written in some C type code, then written in a compiler of Java in Java.

[dreadmullet]

Someone explain this to me:

Generating 4096x4096 random 8-bit integers takes 8.0 seconds.

Generating 4096x4096 random 64-bit floating point numbers and casting them to 32 bit floats takes 7.5 seconds.

I'm using C++ and boost::random.

[RulerOfNothing]

Hmmm. Maybe downcasting to a 8-bit integer takes some time, or possibly the second scenario is better positioned to take advantage of certain features of modern CPUs?