Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls
bookofhook.blogspot.com288 pointsby psykotic59 comments
Where a Load-Acquire appears in program order after a Store-Release, the memory access generated by the Store-Release instruction is Observed-by each PE to the extent that PE is required to observe the access coherently, before the memory access generated by the Load-Acquire instruction is Observed-by that PE, to the extent that the PE is required to observe the access coherently.
// Thread 1
flag1.store(1, SeqCst)
if flag2.load(SeqCst) == 0 {
// Guarded action
}
// Thread 2
flag2.store(1, SeqCst)
if flag1.load(SeqCst) == 0 {
// Guarded action
}
f(g(x))
{ let y = g(x); f(y) }
let v: Vec<_> = iter.collect();
As a self-taught who later went to university for pure mathematics (which I got interested in through game programming), that was not my experience with the late 90s, early 2000s generation of self-taught game programmers. I think you have to go back 5 to 10 years earlier for that stereotype to have merit; the transition from 2D to 3D filtered out some people.
In the post-Quake generation, the sexy thing for budding game programmers was 3D graphics programming. For the most part you had no choice [1] but to read, understand and implement SIGRAPH papers and doctoral dissertations to learn the ropes, which in turn forced us to learn a lot of the formal prerequisites albeit unevenly. And there were a lot of advanced data structures involved with visibility determination (and later level of detail), which was the focal point of graphics in the Quake 1 and 2 era before it fell to the wayside once the dominance of GPUs made more brute-force approaches the right choice. So whether you liked it or not, you had to master a decent swath of university-level CS and math.
The main thing self-taughts generally lacked when joining the industry were the same thing all new employees lacked: they don't yet know how to work in teams, they don't know how to manage time, scope and complexity (though it helps if you've worked on larger personal projects of your own), they cannot make long-term engineering trade-offs (reliability, cost of making changes early vs late, flexibility vs performance, etc) because they haven't gone through full project cycles, and so on.
[1] There were a few useful resources like Abrash's Dr. Dobbs articles on Quake which were partially pre-digested for easier consumption by programmers, but it was still daunting if you didn't understand the math. And the rate of progress was so high in this period that the few reliable sources of how-to information were so quickly out of date that you _had_ to keep up with the academic research and experiment by implementing and improving it yourself.