id Software's Original 'Softdisk' Games Open Sourced 100
An anonymous reader writes "The original games developed by John Carmack, John Romero, and Adrian Carmack at Softdisk, where the legendary programmers originally met and went on to start id Software, have been open-sourced under the GPLv2. The games are now owned by Flat Rock Software and the open-source titles available are Catacomb, The Catacomb, Catacomb 3D, Catacomb Abyss, and Hovertank3D. The oldest of these games are written in Borland Turbo Pascal while the others are in Borland C++. The source-code can be downloaded from GitHub."
Re:Wow.. Pascal. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, really?
It is called analyzing your project and mapping the thing out before you write a single line of code. Programming is a discipline as well as an art and a science.
I was once talking to a guy and he as complaining the compiler kept erroring out on "symbol table is full". I asked to look at his code and OMG he was declaring variables by the butt load, but the thing of it was they were all subtle variations of the same thing, and lots and lots of structs. So I should him how to make a linked list of a single of structs with variants. I explained that with little effort these would be declared on the heap and that running out of space in the symbol table would be a thing of the past. Also he was no longer limited by the stack and that he had all the memory the machine could muster for variables.
These days troubleshooting code has become such a chore simply because languages these days let you declare variables anywhere so you have to track down where things declared just to figure out what is happening and dynamically typed languages are the absolute worst thing to come along simply because they only add to the confusion since the compiler or intepreter has to try and determine intent and they all pretty much suck at doing it.
I have written pascal programs in excess of 100K lines broken up into many modules and I actually find them easier to debug than other so called modern languages simple because the discipline of declaration forces you to really think things through, rather than just popping things in here and there in an ad-hoc manner.