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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: 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.