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by sillysaurus3 4459 days ago
Yeah, this has the side effect of making it almost impossible for newcomers to have any clue what the heck is going on until they have several months of (painful) experience trying to figure out each piece.

It doesn't have to be this complicated. Humans just made it that way. I'm just trying to make sure everyone understands that there's nothing mysterious or even especially interesting about these terms. It's complicated like an internal combustion engine is complicated, not like math.
1 comments
nightski 4459 days ago
So you are proposing that the difference in calling it a "program" vs. a "shader" increases the complexity of learning the concept by several months?
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sillysaurus3 4459 days ago
Sure, it did for me. I think mental models are important, and that it's kind of dopey to call something by a confusing name. (I'm looking at you, physics!) But on the other hand, I'm not very smart, and I had to spend most of my time on gradeschool instead of learning shaders. It was also before wonderful resources like stackoverflow/HN/reddit/etc, so there weren't a lot of people to help clarify my mental model.

As I've gotten older it's become easier to think abstractly and accept that names sometimes have nothing to do with what things are. But when you're first starting out, it's natural to want to visualize everything you learn as what it sounds like.

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lexis 4459 days ago
If shaders are hard, it's mostly because they require a full understanding of 3D math, the complete graphic pipeline, texture sampling, image manipulation techniques and how it all comes together before you can actually start doing anything useful; so the learning curve has a slope of 'wat' to almost all newcomers. If anything, naming is just a nuisance.
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sillysaurus3 4459 days ago
they require a full understanding of 3D math, the complete graphic pipeline, texture sampling, image manipulation techniques and how it all comes together before you can actually start doing anything useful

Hm, not really. I learned more from messing with working demos and prototypes than studying theory. But YMMV.

It's absolutely true that the whole pipeline is very intimidating for newcomers, though.

I love that phrase... "the learning curve has a slope of 'wat'."

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