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Allen Webster
@AllenWebster4th
Working at Epic Games, opinion my own. Also a member of the team.
Washington, USA4coder.comJoined January 2013

Allen Webster’s Tweets

If we programmers are going to prioritize understanding what we're doing, we will need to learn how to have good conversations about our competing ideas.
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It speaks volumes that I only got some name suggestions in private. This topic is currently radioactive twitter.com/AbnerCoimbre/s…
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I think a big problem is that they are taught together with array lists and you get all the O(n) vs O(1) etc. stuff which not only is something you absolutely don't care about as a beginner, but also, every simple use case for lists you get shown basically just needs an array
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Linked lists are criminally underrated. If they're not in your tool box you're going to make everything you touch more complicated than it needs to be.
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I won't pretend to know how engineers can stomach doing 's dirty work. What excuse is left for sitting on the sidelines? How far does the decline have to go before it becomes obvious we're going to have to fix it ourselves?
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This thread makes some good points about the UI design here, but the glaringly-obvious issue has little to do visual appeal, readability, alignment, or mismatched corners. It has *everything* to do with the fact that @microsoft treats its users like hamsters on a wheel. twitter.com/jensenharris/s…
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Great UI should help people achieve a task with minimum friction. But the next section down is expressly designed to introduce friction into my experience. It's the largest UI in the Start menu, and it's designed specifically to distract me away from achieving my intended task.
Ad for Microsoft Edge
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Our recap of the Wheel Reinvention Jam is now up on YouTube! We showed off 10 different submissions, ranging from cookbooks to UEFI libraries, and interviewed the project authors about their work. This community is pretty amazing. ❤️
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Dear Internet, I hope you are well. I was wondering if you could help me "pros & cons" this. C's "volatile" as a type property instead of as a property of an individual statement/operation. 'volatile U64* addr;' vs 'x = vol_load_u64(addr);' or something like that.
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By the way, something like this just doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's one step in a process of iterations. Big thanks to for publishing his own UEFI hello world program and answering questions about how to get started.
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Someday we will lower the barrier to entry on every aspect of computing. This project is one small step! Go learn how to start an operating system project! handmade.network/p/308/lil-uefi/
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In my university program, we were ~never told to open even a simple debugger, and definitely not taught how to use them. These are not serious places to learn programming
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Do they teach college programming classes about how to actually properly find + fix bugs? Or is it still something they just assume people will pick up through osmosis as they learn how to program in general?
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Complexity in compilers, linkers, OSes, debuggers, are choices. We choose complexity because of elitist attitudes that prefer gate keeping computation, and our own laziness to fight the momentum. Every one of these roads I go down I see it more and more.
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With the exception of my current team, on every team I've been on since git became popular, I've been "the git person". You know, the person that people WHO ARE PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMMERS go to when their git repo gets into a state broken state and they need an "expert" to fix it.
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Git is not a success story. Git is a failure as a system with a crap user experience that forces you to learn more about the tool you're using that about getting your work done.
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What would make a different world would be if we could all envision easily replacing the compiler we are using the moment it becomes necessary. If your new language is just a different trap - then no thank you. If your language sets me free, I am interested.
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I am in agreement with Ryan here - programming language progress is a bad proxy for technology progress. The key point to me is the decades of work put into it. Languages should not be black holes, whose gravitational pull we can never escape...
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New post (rant?) on the modern obsession with more systems languages, and why I think it’s a huge waste of time. #programming rfleury.com/p/more-languag
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daily remind: writing parser not big brain magic, recursive descent clear and obvious only few tricks to learn elites not want u to to know this i have 485 parsers
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Replying to @Garulon @_andrewmartin_ and @mwk4
fact check: false if grug smart enough to write compiler u smart enough trick is learn recursive descent: is easy/obvious & every professional use, but schools not teach: grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-parsi big brain @munificentbob write excellent book craftinginterpreters.com u can do!
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