I agree. Game dev is a very different way to learn to code, and one that's more accessible when you don't have specific guidance.
If you just want to do indie game dev, it's great, but it doesn't transfer and it teaches bad habits without the basis you mention in bits & bytes, data structures & algorithms.
While programming in general is highly abstract & often requires you to form a roughly analogous model of the situation in your head, game-dev programming usually involves you working directly on that model. It's very physical. Move this to that location, shrink those, animate the other, fade that out of existence. It's much easier to see the effect of your code in a game engine than through programming a sorting algorithm and logging the results to console.
For that reason, it's a great way to see if programming might be something you enjoy. It's not a great way to learn programming.
edit: apologies, I didn't see xyzzy_plugh's comment before making my own.
It did make me do a double-take the first time I found out that Chthonic's blood-soaked bassist was called Doris. Taiwanese band, not Chinese, but this particular cultural quirk does seem to carry over. There's a Freddy, Zac and of course Doris herself just in Chthonic.
Just commenting about Facebook ads, the rest is pretty accurate in my experience -
On FB, that's the remarketing side, and it's a lot more manual. Generally the goals and data will be selected by the advertiser themselves. It works, but it's a bit blunt-weapon-y - let's say it'll catch 10% of people who are absolutely going to convert, and 90% of people who are absolutely uninterested for campaign X. All percentages here are pulled from nowhere, they're just to give you a general idea.
Remarketing is popular because conversions. Also, if you're well-off or otherwise a desirable target, you cost more to reach through Facebook - so you're likely to see more remarketing campaigns, because automatic campaigns will adjust to target less expensive individuals until they've gone through all of them.
Facebook's automatic targeting is a lot more sophisticated, and much more in line with the suggestion engine idea. Let's say it will catch 0.2% of people who are absolutely going to convert, 9.8% of people who might possibly convert, 45% of people who vaguely appreciate the ad being there without converting (including people who might Like/Share/comment on the post), and 45% of people for whom the ad doesn't really connect. It's not usually quite as powerful for conversion, but on average it's pretty accurate at guessing if you'll be interested.
Also, StumbleUpon was a decent suggestion engine once upon a time - if they could actually design a proper extension that did something similar, I'm sure it would be a success.
Looking at Steam, there's a huge undercurrent of games that don't get pushed, don't appeal to the hardcore, but that - in aggregate - sell a very noticeable amount.
Hidden object games, educational games for children, iOS and Android ports.
In the case of the former two - with no real marketing, and with a great deal of competition, these still fly off the digital shelves, and are not expensive to produce. There are people who want these games, and Steam honestly is not doing the best job of getting in touch with these people. Integration with the rest of the Facebook ecosystem would really really help push these games towards the people who want to buy them.
For the last option, people often buy these games when they felt good about playing the iOS/Android game and want to continue the experience (or in rare cases, play a more full-featured version - usually the PC port is incomplete, but sometimes it does contain unique bonuses). I imagine Facebook would have a killer app if it could sync your iOS/Android saved games (or even just achievements) to the PC version of the save game.
TL:DR; I think there's a huge opportunity for a major casual gaming platform, and I think Facebook's pretty well placed to be that platform.
> [Oracle]: even Java programmers don't learn about Java bytecode.
Uh, what? I'd hardly call myself a dedicated Java programmer and I've learned about Java bytecode. I had to, and wanted to. I'd guess most professional Java programmers would consider it a point of pride to do the same!
I've worked in many large Java enterprises and nobody knew about the bytecode. They knew it was there but not what it consisted of how it was structured. It's no different to many C/C++/Go etc developers not understanding what ASM gets generated.
I guess that makes sense actually, I think I only even ran into an issue where bytecode was actually relevant because I'm just a hobbyist programmer. So I like to explore things that have only marginal utility and don't have anyone else to help out with specialist stuff. I can imagine how a professional developer wouldn't ever want or need to deal with bytecode.
I was taught JVM bytecode as part of a required class for my CS degree. We had to write a rudimentary interpreter for a subset of it.
While it might not be required to dig deep into the bytecode, the fact that Java comes completely with a suite of tools for dealing with bytecode suggests Sun did expect developers to understand and work with the JVM bytecode at some level.
There are undoubtedly issues with GMO if it is abused - but the fact that it is capable of sharp distinctions between right and wrong and can be legally controlled is good, and should be embraced. Happy to see GMO companies take steps in this direction. You can't reliably control whether someone breeds dogs to suffer hip dysplasia or constant headaches due to their brain being too large for their skull. Less emotively, you can't reliably control whether apple breeders end up with over-sweet mush that no-one wants or banana breeders end up with infertile crops. We can and (I believe) should control whether or not Monsanto engineers defective crops designed to maximise their profits at the expense of farmers (note: Monsanto has not actually marketed or sold the famous 'sterile' or 'terminator' seeds at time of writing, although they own the patent). We can and should control whether or not a GMO dog is created that suffers from hip dysplasia or injurious brain problems.
Funnily enough, one of the reasons the terminator gene was created was because anti-gmo activist wanted assurances that artificially created genes wouldn't escape into the wild.
In addition, farmers who rotate crops also want terminator seeds because it reduces the number of volunteer plants in subsequent harvests.
Most of the anti terminator stuff I've read betrays a deep lack of understanding about how the underlying technology actually works.
If you just want to do indie game dev, it's great, but it doesn't transfer and it teaches bad habits without the basis you mention in bits & bytes, data structures & algorithms.
While programming in general is highly abstract & often requires you to form a roughly analogous model of the situation in your head, game-dev programming usually involves you working directly on that model. It's very physical. Move this to that location, shrink those, animate the other, fade that out of existence. It's much easier to see the effect of your code in a game engine than through programming a sorting algorithm and logging the results to console.
For that reason, it's a great way to see if programming might be something you enjoy. It's not a great way to learn programming.
edit: apologies, I didn't see xyzzy_plugh's comment before making my own.