I once tweeted this as a John Bois-esque joke but it was too true make anyone mad and therefore be funny. From the passion with which people argue about their choice of language (and the fact they're called "languages" in the first place) makes them sound vastly different, when in practice their differences are closer to MLA vs. APA style or Photoshop vs. Clip Studio Paint. Naively I thought arguments were because of massive irreconcilable differences as opposed to whether or not tabs or curly braces are better formatting, but I should have known that like all other experienced artists the fights are most ferocious. Like arguments over the oxford comma, I understand being prepared to kill or die over whether formatting is done with tabs or curly braces, but you're still writing some variant on " for (i = 0; i <j; i++)".
I understand that different languages have different tolerances for how dank you're allowed to get and how much hubris they will allow, but it at least seems to me like the bigger difference is not between the languages but what different kinds of people with different specialties and interests are ultimately doing with the code. There is a kind of programmer who does advanced 4D math to squeeze out every inch of graphics performance and there is another kind of programmer who does nothing but keeps track of a bajillion arrays that are holding all the data for a Menu Game.
As a game designer of the latter kind this is more what I'm interested in so I now understand why a lot of programming guides are about organizing and naming conventions instead of math because...that's what programming is. The computer is doing the math, unless you are the sort of person that invents new math for computers. My job is to keep it organized.
i cannot stress enough how true and important that “the computer is doing the math” bit is
i was in remedial classes since elementary school and at this point i don’t know if i have actual dyscalculia or if it was just a self-fulfilling prophecy sorta thing but i literally never recovered. even when i went to college my advisor was like “yeah you should do informatics instead of computer science bc there’s less math involved”
the idea that “programming IS math and therefore i am incapable of wrapping my brain around it” probably set back my gamedev aspirations at least a decade. don’t let that shit scare you off
when i was in high school i Knew* that i wanted to be a writer, so the minute that math was no longer a required class i dropped it. in second year of university i discovered 1. i hated taking english classes and 2. i fuckin loved making games. so i switched majors into compsci and thus ended up having to take some math. i then proceeded to fail the basic math course TWICE. it was some of the most anxiety inducing shit ive ever experienced
thankfully, by the time i was failing math i KNEW that i didnt need it to make games, because i had been doing it already.
(the hilarious postscript of this story is that the first job i got out of uni was at a math education company. i basically speedran imposter syndrome)
