Carmack the Magnificent

(BTW, the title of this blog entry is a spin on one of my favorite TV personalities from many years ago, Johnny Carson)

I just finished reading an interview Tom’s Games did with John Carmack,
the mastermind behind id Software. I love hearing from him. He’s very
respected in the gaming industry, is a really smart guy, is totally a
geek, but has a good eye on the industry. You learn a lot about where
gaming is going technology-wise and business-wise by listening to him.

A
couple of things he mentioned interested me. He did bring up multi-core
computing and how gaming programmers are still trying to figure out how
to take advantage of all those extra concurrent threads. As with
everything, it’s going to really change the way programmers think. In
what I’m sure was a Freudian slip by the writer, he used the word
"paralyze" instead of "parallelize". I think that’s exactly what’s
happening. Programmers are paralyzed as they try to figure out what to
do. It goes against everything they’ve been trained.

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