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Re: Nasir Gebelli on Youtube



heuser.marcus@freenet.de wrote:
On Jun 28, 3:23 am, BLuRry <brendan.rob...@gmail.com> wrote:

Wow.  That's THE Nasir?  He made some awesome games in his time!
He's so incredibly engineer-like, and very modest.


Yes, he seems to be a very pleasant person. But I won't call him
"mythical" just because he wasn't that visible to the public back
then and has other interests besides getting rich and famous.

He's Iranian, by the way. Some folks should remember this when
they cry for bombarding a certain country in the middle east.



If John Romero is freaking out about this guy's coding prowess,
you know he must be a mondo-badass.  :-)


Romero is / always was badass - maybe even too much so.
But he knows his stuff well enough to recognize and support (!)
real geniuses and work horses like Carmack for example.

There is a good book about id-Software from the Apple days to
Quake called "Masters of Doom" describing the "personality disorders"
and under-developed social skills these guys have ;-)

I think its good that Romero sells this DVD nearly ten years after
the event to make his "personal gurus" better known.



I can't believe the guy didn't ever use a printer or any other
programming helper tools... just hammers out code non-stop.  Amazing.


It's the old "pressure sometimes gives the best results" principle, I
guess.

And most programmers today don't really know how good their
environment is.

I agree.  But it has always interested me how "implicit" the
interface between programmer and machine becomes, regardless of
what it actually is.

I've used dozens of interfaces for programming, from pushbuttons
on bits, to keypunches and assemblers, to compilers, to integrated
environments, and the one characteristic they all share is that
they fade into the background as I program the machine.

They can provide some (less than you would hope) leverage, or
some (more than you would hope) inconvenience, but the mind makes
them all ultimately transparent to the act of programming.

Any usable tool becomes an extension of oneself, and is no longer
"visible" in the process of use.  Bad tools are the ones that take
longer to "disappear" than good ones.  ;-)

While in the heat of creation, time stops, the path to the goal
becomes crystalline, obstacles become welcome challenges, and
programmer and machine become symbiotically united.  What a rush!

-michael

NadaNet file server for Apple II computers!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."