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posted by martyb on Wednesday October 21 2015, @02:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the make-sure-it-runs-in-a-vm dept.

As ever under such circumstances, I went through my list of email and Twitter contacts, seeing this as a good opportunity to offer some exposure to indie developers whose work I've enjoyed over the years. One response came back very quickly, albeit from a name I didn't quite recognise. The message was in fact from a developer's wife; the person I was trying to get in touch with had died the previous week.

The developer in question was Stewart Hogarth, who'd lost his battle with congenital heart disease; he was just 34. We'd only been in touch a few times, but I'd been captivated a couple of years ago by his truly excellent 8-bit tribute I Am Level for iOS and Android. This was a smart, charming, entertaining title that married eye-searing Spectrum-style graphics, old-school single-screen platforming challenges, and modern mobile tilt-based controls. It was still installed on all of my devices, and it was strange and very sad to think that the person who created it was no longer with us.

Another developer I was interviewing at the time expressed his shock regarding Stew's passing, and also concern that his work's availability was now potentially on borrowed time.

As a developer, he said it was almost like a little of his soul somehow went into each app or game he made; through what you've created, you can in some way live on if you're no longer around. This of course isn't new thinking — people often say similar things when it comes to art and literature, and even film and music. But those mediums[sic] have the kind of longevity that just isn't afforded to modern digital apps.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JNCF on Wednesday October 21 2015, @03:39PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday October 21 2015, @03:39PM (#252800) Journal

    He has probably has 2 or 3 years left. [mythryl.org] From the link:

    I've spent a decade developing Mythryl in the expectation of 2-3 decades
    of return on investment, but now it looks like I cannot count on more
    than 2-3 years of return on investment, so I guess the joke is on me.

    It is also worth noting that chemo fatigue is cutting heavily into my
    Mythryl programming output -- I just came off 10 days of no Mythryl
    commits, where before chemo I rarely went a day without a commit -- and
    my productivity is likely to continue to decline as the dying process
    proceeds, both from fatigue and from decline in motivation to work on
    it as the return-on-investment period shrinks.

    Judging from the activity level on this list when I don't post,
    Mythryl will die with me.

    That's a bit of a shame, because it means the mainstream world is
    going to spend about 20-30 years re-inventing Mythryl when it could
    have adopted it directly and saved a bunch of time. Mythryl represents
    about an eight-figure development effort in commercial terms[1], plus
    it is vendor-neutral in an era when we're returning to vendor-specific
    languages: Java is Oracle's property, F# is Microsoft's, Go is Google's
    etc. This will be hard on the open-source world.

    (I think many open source programmers today don't remember the
    pre-C/Unix world when every major vendor had its own programming
    languages and ecology, with the major exceptions of Fortran and Cobol.
    C/Unix was different because they came from Bell Labs at a time when
    owner AT&T was a regulated monopoly forbidden from entering
    commercially into software and operating systems, so it released
    C+Unix "free" (about a $100 tape copying charge, iirc) which let it
    take over first the academic world (resulting in BSD Unix) and then
    the commercial world -- the 1980s "Unix wars", which ended with the
    death of countless commercial competitors to Unix. But now both AT&T
    and Bell Labs are dead (the current "AT&T" is just a renamed Southwest
    Bell) and there won't be any more gifts like that to the software
    world, so we'll have to either make our own via the Linux Foundation
    or such, or else drift back into a fragmented world of per-vendor
    software ecologies with little in the way of portability between them
    (which seems to be the trend at present).

    Anyhow, that won't be my problem, I'll be pushing up daises shortly,
    according to the current oncology odds-makers.

    But anyone thinking of keeping Mythryl alive beyond 2-3 years out might
    want to think about learning how to maintain the codebase while I'm
    still around to answer questions. Fair warning.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @04:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @04:43PM (#252830)

    The other way of looking at it is that Java, C#, Go etc have a major corporation with a large software dev staff that is highly motivated to keeping their language alive and competitive, in terms of new features, compatibility, and price, without instituting legal restrictions so bothersome it would drive a huge percentage of their userbase away (RMS and his ideological followers don't amount to a huge percentage).

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @07:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @07:12PM (#252876)

      (RMS and his ideological followers don't amount to a huge percentage)

      Which is really a shame. We see countless stories of proprietary software abusing its users, the government is conducting mass surveillance and trying to violate our privacy at every turn, and of course proprietary software denies the users their freedoms. It's sad to see that people value convenience over freedom and privacy, and when someone wants to help them, they're labeled 'extremists' (which is a subjective term) for daring to stand up to rampant injustices and corporatism.