Things we like a lot:

  • 9Front. Obsessed! Modern fork of Bell Labs’ OS after Unix.

  • UXN/Varvara. Kinda like Pico-8 if it were cooler and more interesting.

  • PS2SDK. It’s been a long running dream of ours to get a whole game running on the machine!

  • Raylib, a really wonderful way to make developing games in C less of a hassle.

  • C! C rocks. Use C, it doesn’t bite, we promise. It’s taught us so much about how software architecture works, and why people choose some options over others. We don’t think we really knew how games worked before we started developing things ourselves in C.

Things we dislike greatly:

  • Object Oriented Programming. Replicating the domain model in code is not a necessary abstraction for the vast majority of tasks. The programmer translates real or designed systems into code for a machine to process, OOP tries to blur the line between the programmer and the designer/nature. Ultimately we think it not only failed to do that, but it’s also been hoisted up as a miraculous product of the mind that increases efficiency and saves management time, effort, and money. Just a really silly thing to have happen to the tech world since the 90s. We were raised on OOP principles when we first started programming in Unity then later Godot. Now that we’ve started working in C, we’ve basically seen the light and will not be going back.. Composition over Inheritance FTW!

  • Garbage collection. It’s like.. fine we guess.. But can’t you just use arenas and take the time to consider your memory model? We think garbage collection allows programmers to make super messy errors everywhere, in the name of “Getting It Done”. Another efficiency thing for the world of shitty corporate software development that ended up leaking into games :(

  • Sadly, Linux. On its face, removed from context it’s fine, but the ways it’s used and the things it’s killed make me wish it never took off the way it did. Plan 9 had a significantly better architecture and stuck to the Unix philosophy so closely, its simplicity is unmatched. Linux is not human sized, one person can’t possibly know every inch of the Linux kernel, but Plan 9 is while being an entire OS instead of just a kernel. Linux represents the computing world’s complicity in stillness, it only survived as long as it has because it’s a free and actively supported version of a product large corporations were already paying for. The future died with Linux, and it’s not really anyone’s fault. Refusing change is just the nature of business… At least UTF-8 survived the fire.