The Marketplace Of Ideals - by Ryan Fleury - Digital Grove

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The Marketplace Of Ideals<br>On Handmade, polarizing Internet debate, rational discussion, controversial personas, tribal conflict, and how they relate to the future of computing.

Ryan Fleury<br>Jul 19, 2023

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When I first learned programming, I was told—by peers, Internet tutorials—and later, when I was in university, by professors—a number of rules. They included ideas like “abstraction is good, to avoid lower level details”, “manual memory management is difficult and you should not do it”, “never write systems from scratch”. The justification for every rule was that it allowed one to avoid programming problems, rather than allowing one to conquer programming problems. In fact, it seemed as though every “rule” presented to me was driven by a hatred of programming, rather than a love for it.<br>I shrugged much of this advice off, but initially internalized much of it too.<br>And then, I found Handmade Hero, in which the host, Casey, demonstrates what writing a game for a Windows PC looks like—from scratch. Every minute of programming—from confusion, to debugging, to sketching out solutions, to typing code—spent on the project is captured live, on a Twitch stream.<br>Now, everyone knows the Carl Sagan quote—“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”—and the series didn’t kick off with a deep dive into quantum mechanics (if that is indeed what would help one invent a universe). But “from scratch”, for Handmade Hero, meant what it used to mean for game developers and systems programmers in the ‘80s or ‘90s: no libraries, no complex programming language features, just writing straightforward, procedural, C-style code to directly command the machine about what must be done to produce the effect of a game (interfacing with operating system or GPU APIs when necessary).<br>Handmade Hero didn’t justify itself with rational arguments immediately. It didn’t justify its existence by debating the utility of libraries, the tradeoffs of modern programming language features, nor a balanced breakdown of its more traditional programming techniques as compared with modern programming approaches. It justified itself with something deeper: care for the product. Handmade Hero’s announcement trailer presented game development as a labor of love—a craft—best done by those passionate about it.

For me, Handmade Hero was immediately captivating because I’m, by temperament, contrarian. If I’m in a room with 100 people, with 99 of them repeating identical dogma, and the remaining 1 passionately and unapologetically presenting a unique perspective, I’m always curious about that one person, and I’m always interested in what they have to say, even if I don’t always end up agreeing with them unilaterally. But, in many cases, I am convinced by that one person—and this certainly was the case with Handmade Hero.<br>After watching the series for a while, I became sure that all of those “rules”—the ones I mentioned above—were wrong. Programmers who cared about what they were doing—the ones who cared enough to handcraft something from scratch—didn’t need to be infantilized. They could understand computers to a much better degree. They could understand problems from first principles, and write solutions from scratch. They could eliminate dependence on libraries, and have a much greater degree of control over their projects. Unchained from a number of technologies written by others, they could achieve entirely new possibilities, which would’ve been incomprehensible for programmers not in on the secret. Love for the craft provided vastly superior results.<br>Handmade Hero ignited a fire that spawned a rapidly growing community. It was filled with many older programmers who found a renewed interest in the ideals that initially motivated them to program. But it was also filled with many young programmers, empowered by their new understanding of the process of programming, as it was originally done. There were a number of amazing projects—all breaking what everyone used to believe were the “laws of programming”. 17, 18, 19 year old programmers had projects that made an embarrassment of university computer science senior capstone projects.<br>Handmade Hero also provided a glimpse into the state of computing—what did an experienced programmer, who grew up in an earlier age of computing, think about modern computers? How had the field progressed—or not—since they were a kid?<br>And with that glimpse came an immense frustration—that same community, at some point deemed the “Handmade community”, felt like computers had been wasted. The community had learned many of the principles required to build software to a much higher standard—and yet every program on modern computers was immensely frustrating. Almost every program was slow, unethical, annoying, and exploitative—and what’s worse? It wasn’t always that way! Computer hardware had...