Thread by @atroyn, doom is the best software and probably the only good piece of [...]

doom is the best software and probably the only good piece of software

to elaborate on this; doom (the video game from 1993) is what all software should aspire to be
- it fulfills the user’s goal in using it (the game is fun)
- it was engineered to run on the common machines of its time while advancing the state of the art

- it gave the user tools to easily modify and make levels for the game which produced a thriving community which exists to this day
- it made it easy for people to share their modifications to the software without having to get down into the actual code

doom was wildly commercially successful (i believe it bought @ID_AA_Carmack his 1st ferrari?) but i am much more interested in how _human_ this software is, how perfectly it fits with what humans want from their machines

it’s a mistake to think that the lessons from doom apply only to video games; regarded as a software system doom is (almost) perfect

minecraft has some of these qualities but not to the same extent that they were deliberately engineered; minecraft’s modding scene for example is based on a tower of hacks of the jvm, not a part of the software itself

(it amazes me that 8 years olds would learn java, it speaks to the power of wanting to participate in something cool with your friends and peers that they’d put themselves through the hell of public static void main)

similarly, minecraft doesn’t really push the state of the art in either graphics or netcode, where doom _invented_ core components for both

doom came out of a tiny team and achieved mainstream cultural success, few properties can really lay claim to that. i think being a tiny team enabled id software to do that at all (p.s. anyone know where i can get that ‘cool guys’ shirt)