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Hey, not the OP, but I did want to offer my 2c anyway, as someone into gamedev. I'd say you're both very right and very, very wrong at the same time. In game development, especially with indies, in the early phases of development many developers take an approach of valuing "getting it going" over everything else. While this might sound short-sighted, it's actually a very canny decision, and often is the only way to gain enough of a foothold to ensure the long-term success of the project when you're working on a very complex piece of software like a game - see Jonathan Blow's youtube video on "The art of getting things going". Additionally there's the relationship of this approach with the game design process, where you need a very fast iteration time on prototyping game mechanics in the early stages, to start finding your way towards something interesting to flesh out into a full product. With that being said, in commercial game development (and experienced indie developers), the performance standards are so much higher than most other fields of programming that it is actually absurd. The focus on performance of much of enterprise software, web apps, and even most native tools, is nowhere even in the same league as that of high-quality games. I would also say that at the highest level of game development there is a very high quality level of code organization and architecture. Games are one of the most complex types of programs, involving physical simulation of a large amount of objects, skeletal animation skinning, very complex rendering and shading, realtime deterministic state synchronization over a network, audio streaming, and on, and on, and on, all happening on a realtime basis. There's simply no room to be "ad hoc" or "hacky" in AAA gamedev because the systems involved are so complex that their architecture has to be extremely robust to even be able to finish the game at all. In my opinion, other fields of programming have a lot to learn from the lessons of game development, but unfortunately gamedev is a bit of an insular field and there's not much cross-pollination between gamedev and other industries. Or you could just look at it like this: AAA Gamedev: Formula 1 car Google / AWS : State of the art metropolitan high-speed rail system Enterprise Software: Diesel bus service Native apps and tools: Sedans, hatchbacks, vans, sports cars Web apps: Bicycles Electron apps: Bicycle with a lawnmower engine welded to the frame that tops out around 20mph and gets 3 miles to the gallon |