The intersection of (Collaboration && Sharing Knowledge) with the Handmade Ethos

[cedric-h]

We've all been there. You open up the entry point of someone else's project, and suddenly you're just drowning in code and you have no idea why any of it is there.

I've been thinking about what Martins said a while ago about how he switched a team from C++ to C# and the quality of the product improved because C++ was just "too much" for the average programmer on that team.

I find myself wondering if the Handmade Ethos really lends itself to collaboration. I feel like a lot of Handmade code is understood best by the person who wrote it.

But maybe software is just better made in smaller teams where you have a higher lowest common denominator than monolithic corporate mobs.

[AsafGartner]

Potential subtopic: The mental model behind the code is not always apparent from the code alone, especially if the code is compressed. The main reason the original programmer understands the code is because they have that mental model. More verbose/OOPy languages tend to encode the mental model more directly, and so it's more apparent to the reader.

[eternalStudent]

I also want to add a closely related topic:
Maybe there's a need for a two-class system of programmers. One of which is of low-level engine/infrastructure programmers with emphasis on performance, and a second of high-level content-creating programmers with emphasis on productivity and deliverability.

That way a very small infrastructure team can write Handmade code in C (or other low-level language), while also providing a bridge to a high-level language in which the other teams can feel more comfortable.