When I first started to watch the stream (I began with the C introduction videos) I immediately noticed that Casey seemed to be what I feel is the norm for most game developers: low level C guys who pretty much hate abstractions and love to optimize things to the metal.
I have to admit that I though about giving up on the streams because of all the hatred he had for such things. At almost every video, he made sure to dismiss everything that make high level languages what they are, by saying why he hated every feature and that he was not in control of everything.
I started liking the stream a lot more after watching the later refactoring videos though, and after so many comments about API design and how APIs should be simple and developer friendly, I just can't believe how someone can like to fiddle with such low level, mundane operations.
I mean... just to get the contents of a file, one needs to call a bunch of functions each with half a dozen parameters, manually alocate memory for the file, and handle failures with deep nested if/else statements testing integer values against some undescript,untyped defines.
At the same time, in C# for example, I can read a file by simply calling File.ReadAllText or File.ReadBytes or something similar and it gives a nice lenght checked, automatically allocated array with the contents.
My question is how can someone who likes good and simple api design so much hate a language with such a clean api an syntax?
And I'm not even going about delegates/events, or iterators and yield, or async await, and many other features that would be almost impossible to implement and maintain in C.
So.... why all the hate? Have any of you guys ever used C#? Perhaps the hatred only exists for C++ and not for all other languages? Do you think a game like Bastion is a poor underperforming game (it was written in XNA using C# and later ported to iOS and Android using Xamarin)?
I feel sometimes that people are just reluctant to learn new things and use new tools... everytime I see Casey have to go to MSDN to look up parameter types and order for some function, a I remember he has VS2013 with some crazy intellisense suport right there, but insists in using command line tools and rudimentary text editors like Emacs it really makes me feel a bit sad for the industry at large, because I figure this is standard behavior for almost all game devs. In my opinion (and I'm not really trying to offend people here really) they are living in a cave and don't want to go outside.