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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • It absolutely should not have been named zeroth() because the reasoning for that is purely pedantic and ignores WHY arrays are 0 indexed. It’s not like the people in the early days of writing programming languages were saying “the zeroth item in the array” - they would refer to it using human language because they are humans, not machines. Arrays are 0 indexed because it’s more efficient for address location. To get the location in memory of an array item, it’s startingAddress + (objectSize * index). If they were 1 indexed, the machine would have to reverse the offset.
    Function/Method names, on the other hand, should be written so as to make the most sense to the humans reading and writing the code, because the humans are the only ones that care what the name is. When you have an array or list, it’s intuitive to think “I want the first thing in the array” or “I want the last thing in the array),” so it makes sense to use first and last. That also makes them intuitive counterparts (what would be the intuitive counterpart to “zeroth”?).



  • I think some portions of the company do want to buy these studios to make games. Mostly because they need a regular funnel of titles to put on Game Pass, and the best way to do that is small- to mid-budget games that can generate hype. But then other portions of the company want to chase that big AAA paycheck because big numbers look good, even if ROI isn’t as good for that one game versus 3 or 4 smaller titles. And others still only care about what will make the balance sheet look the best for the quarter.
    Even smaller companies end up with various “factions” within the org as far as vision and how to best create success (or even how to define success); a company like Microsoft is so fractured that different divisions are unaware of each other’s goals and have competing interests.
    I’m not trying to defend Microsoft here, I just think this is a consequence of an overly large organization that doesn’t have unified goals.