"...or graphics code you are constantly told "just express what you want to express directly, and the system is smart enough to do things as efficiently as possible"."
Who is saying that? I've worked in video games for 18 years and never heard that. In fact, anyone who said that would get puzzled and suspicious looks. We generally use a very C-like variant of C++.
This. I get to think about a bunch of different problems, some of them interesting, some of them difficult or impossible to solve, with a team of malcontents and nutballs. It's like being on a crew of pirates who stress about implementing k-d trees, matchmaking, deploying dedicated servers, build systems, scaling everything appropriately and doing it all as fast as possible. And at the end you ship something which is hopefully magical, possibly something that is shit, either way you have a giant party and tell awesome stories.
Who is saying that? I've worked in video games for 18 years and never heard that. In fact, anyone who said that would get puzzled and suspicious looks. We generally use a very C-like variant of C++.