The Best. Mobile. Game. Evar.

posted by jack at 09:42 CET in / compute

Since back in the 80's, this funky Welsh dude (complete with an unhealthy fascination with farmyard animals) named Jeff Minter (aka yak) has produced videogames and software toys for the platform du jour, starting with the old Commodore Vic-20 and continuing right up to the current Xbox 360. The hallmark of all his games has been extremely trippy visuals, moreso over time...

Now, one of his latest works, gridrunner++, has been ported to J2ME, which means that you (yes, you!) can run it on your cellphone! OK, not just *any* cellphone, but most of the middling-or-better European-market phones from the past couple years (and probably some of their American counterparts). I bought a copy here, and you should do the same. Even on the tiny screen, this thing is a dazzling display of exploding, twisting, pixel-shattery goodness. You owe it to yourself, I'm sure.

The Worst Object-Oriented Language

posted by jack at 22:46 CET in / compute / programming

I've been doing object-oriented programming and design since 1994. Most of that work has been centered on Objective-C, with a bit of dabbling in Smalltalk quite some time ago, occasional forays into Java, and increasingly more Python during the past few years. During the past year, I've finally had a reason to get deep into a project with C++, and now I know what I've been missing: A heap of nasty syntax and inflexibility, that's what!

Don't get me wrong, C++ is definitely a lot more powerful than just plain old C, and you can do some clever things with its templates and some other language features (with the caveat that in doing these clever things, you are relying heavily on the compiler doing lots of things that are far from explicit in the code, which is quite different from standard C). My main gripe with C++ is that the object-oriented constructs it provides are really very not suited to the practice of object-oriented programming as it stands today (which may be a subject of future postings here).

On a whim, I recently googled "worst object oriented language", and got some interesting results. This query produced 103 results, which Google whittled down to just 12 after removing what it thinks are probably duplicates. Four of those were essentially the same quote from one article, pasted into different contexts, while the other eight seemed to be unique utterances. In all of these cases, the language being described was (drumroll, please...) yes, C++. At least I'm not alone in feeling this way.