I have this firm belief that demo writers are literal gods amongst programmers. Nothing comes close to their knowledge and craftsmanship and the resulting art they create. To me it is the purest form of programming bar none. I'm in constant awe and have the utmost respect for these guys. Just had to get it off my chest. Thanks for reading!
Same here, bro. I sincerely cannot even start to fathom how could 0x4015 create that amount of interaction, data, audio, shaders, engine, etc and just pack it into 4 measly kB. Damn!
I know they employ algorithmic composition for basically everything, still... 4kb wouldn't hold a single frame of anything to today's standards. It surely is impressive.
I used to feel like you. Having done some mediocre demos myself, I looked up to some of the best democoders a lot. Until I met them (hey, demoscene is tiny - just show up at a demoparty and meet your heros in person). I noticed that the top democoders were invariably:
- extremely nice
- better than me at graphics programming
- worse than me at X
For example, at some point long ago I wrote a tool to synchronize effects to music. A famous democoder wanted to try it, I said "here you go", he said "shit, the API is in C++. I don't know C++". Turns out all these amazing demos were written in C and this guy had never bothered to learn classes, templates, etc etc. Of course there's nothing wrong with that, but, well, it's just different skills. I mean every programmer I knew at that time knew C++. It's like working in web dev and not knowing any JavaScript at all. It was very surprising to me :-)
tl;dr I'm sure I make better scalable realtime backends than some top democoders would.
> tl;dr I'm sure I make better scalable realtime backends than some top democoders would.
Exactly; some make magic happen in 4K, others can spin up 4000 high performance GPU servers in a matter of minutes, out-performing the supercomputers of just a few years ago while costing a fraction of it. It's amazing how much power some can squeeze out with the tightest of constraints AND how much power others can summon with the biggest of credit cards. These two overlap, too.
> I have this firm belief that demo writers are literal gods amongst programmers.
If they were considered gods there would likely be no scene.
> Nothing comes close to their knowledge and craftsmanship and the resulting art they create.
Subjective, but sure.
> To me it is the purest form of programming bar none.
Definitely wouldn't say it is a pure form of programming. The demoscene is on the one hand about community and on the other about producing something. Pureness doesn't really fit into that too well. I would probably even say that the scene has a bias towards the unpure. Just like a lot of other scenes, like in music.