What killed Smalltalk could kill Python

[sohcahtoa82 at gmail.com]

On Thursday, January 22, 2015 at 9:39:53 PM UTC-8, alex23 wrote:
> On 22/01/2015 1:23 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > Modern games *are* part of "today's complex application systems", and games
> > developers may need the same skills used by "serious developers"
> 
> I wish more game developers would understand this. I've lost count of 
> the number of games that have failed during development because all of 
> the source code was stolen or destroyed. I've had arguments with game 
> devs (some who've worked at some of the bigger studios) because they're 
> convinced that nothing outside of game development has anything to teach 
> them...when their (for eg) revision control entails zipping up their 
> daily changes and emailing them to the rest of the team...

Could be worse.

I seem to recall an interview with someone from Blizzard Entertainment mentioning that the first Warcraft game (Released in 1994) was developed by passing around floppy disks with new code among the developers.

Though I imagine that was actually probably pretty common back then.

But yeah...if you have more than 1 developer, version control of some sort just isn't optional.  Having to manually merge changes is extremely tedious.  If you're a solo developer, its still a good idea.  Even if you don't take advantage of branching and undoing commits, it's good to at least have a backup of your code somewhere.