Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

  • self@awful.systems
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    17 hours ago

    I extremely recommend The Little Schemer as a gentle introduction to both programming interactively and to some of the fundamentals of computer science. some of the other books in the series are also good, gentle introductions to some more advanced CS topics too, but they all assume youā€™ve read through some of this one.

    Andrew Plotkinā€™s Lists and Lists is also pretty good as a self-contained learning environment with a tutorial

    other than that, I second the Python recommendation. another first language recommendation I can make is GDScript, the Godot scripting language. it has a very good in-browser interactive tutorial for programming fundamentals, and a very detailed manual once your learning goes beyond what the interactive tutorial teaches. game programming isnā€™t the easiest way to start in general, but Godot has a few advantages in this area: you can see an interesting result right away when writing code, its scripting language is very well-integrated with its tooling, and itā€™s fairly close to a couple of other languages in syntax and semantics (specifically Python) so your knowledge should transfer fairly well.

      • self@awful.systems
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        13 hours ago

        hell yeah! roguelikes are so much fun to work on! that could be a very good way to learn GDScript. generally I recommend learning your first couple languages to completion ā€” but where you decide what complete is, including ā€œIā€™m tired of this language/projectā€ (not at all an uncommon case, and a good sign your brainā€™s ready for something new). once youā€™re at that point, youā€™ll likely be ready for a new language ā€” and languages generally get much easier to learn once youā€™ve got a couple under your belt.

        (also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myselfā€¦ thereā€™s a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)

        • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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          13 hours ago

          (also, I might take on a roguelike project in Godot myselfā€¦ thereā€™s a new library I want to try which implements my favorite way to do game logic for roguelikes)

          this looks really cool šŸ‘€

          • self@awful.systems
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            10 hours ago

            Iā€™m excited to try it! Iā€™ve had so many game ideas lately thatā€™d be a lot more convenient to do with godotā€™s tooling, but would really benefit from something like Bevyā€™s ECS. this one looks broadly inspired by a similar API to Bevy so it could be the best of both worlds. Iā€™m very curious how it performs ā€” itā€™s almost certainly gonna be slower than Bevy, but thereā€™s a lot of types of games where logic isnā€™t a bottleneck.