I’m a software developer too so I get it. It’s hard enough to get anyone to care about something you’ve done. I’m sure it’s cool to see so many people enjoying your game! I wish you the best of luck!

I’m a big fan of Caesar 3 and City Skylines. Is there anything you feel like Pompeii does better than those two?

If chemical engineering can predict the way trillions of molecules will bounce off each other using equations are reasonably accurate. I’m confident we can do the same for software. How long that take? I hope it’s in my lifetime. 😆

It took centuries of building off of scientific research to come up with a comprehensive set of equations that they could confidently use to guide their design decisions. The equations aren’t perfect, but they’re good enough to bet millions of dollars with.

To give you an idea of how this would look in software, instead of using big O notation, imagine you actually calculated the estimated runtime performance in seconds of your algorithm on specific hardware. It may sound impossible, but the same was true for chemical engs with their problems.

Those are fundamental math classes which enable you to understand the equations in you engineering classes. I majored in chemical eng and every ChemE class was an applied math class. As far as I’m aware the same is true for other engineering majors.

I think we really need mathematics to help guide design decisions if we want to be proper engineers. People do some rough estimates, but it’s not to the same level as a traditional engineering field. I think it’s very doable, but without math I think we severely hamper our potential as an industry.

I feel like I’ve seen talks by Mary and I seem to remember that she doesn’t believe we are a true engineering discipline… yet, but we are working towards it. Is that essentially the conclusion of the book?

Point taken—but they might be piecing together a lot of legacy components. Again, I’m not saying that’s a good excuse, but it can take a lot of effort to push back against creating a bad user experience, especially when refactoring is involved. Not that I’m speaking from experience… 😆

I agree with how silly that workflow is, but do you really it’s because they didn’t think about the user experience? My guess would be that it was easier to do it that way and it wasn’t worth improving the experience, at least in their assessment.