Quote:
Originally Posted by Mir  ...
So what CAN I take from my real world experience and apply to game / software development? It seems like a whole separate world to me, but maybe it isn't. I'm mostly concerned about the major pitfalls that programming for the web wouldn't have prepared me for. |
Without going into too much detail, if you're working with languages that are interpreted instead of compiled you have not been exposed to a kind of complexity that exists below the interpreter. Everything you have done thus far assumes the application that is interpreting your code will take care of everything for you. If you begin doing the C/C++, Java, FORTRAN, etc.. that make up the library side of most programming you need to worry about much bigger issues. Now, every one of those languages is different, but overall they do not solve dynamic memory acquisition, threading, asynchronism, and other lower level issues. Also, basic IO operations can be more complicated, and in some cases is flat out rude. (Yes, java does trash collection, I know.)
It depends a LOT on what you're actually doing. Some tasks are very straight forward, others can be extremely complicated. It's not the best measure, but the first application I worked on out of college was 8 million lines of code server + client. MySQL is about 850000 lines of code.
EDIT: spelling/grammar
