Hello everyone,
As a follower of the Handmade philosophy for a long time, pretty much since I learned about Handmade Hero when it came out, I've been building projects (whether commercial or personal) using this philosophy in mind.
Most of my programming expertise is self-taught, but also some is inspired by people like Casey and Jon Blow, and adapting what I've learned into high level languages like C# and Haxe.
Of course, both these languages are OOP languages and would inherently be, in theory, adversaries of the Handmade philosophy.
To give a better perspective on what feedback/opinions I'm looking for, my choice of tools include:
- C#/WinForms - I use WinForms effectively as my go-to for fast application development, purely on the basis that it was the toolset I first learned and continue to use for personal use. This probably doesn't fall under the category of "Handmade" as I'm using a large framework with many third-party libraries written by other people.
- Haxe/Kha - A little more "Handmade" friendly than the point above, but of course means a lot more work is required to build something that is reminiscent of a piece of software that people can use, without needing to resort extensively to using third-party libraries.
My question is this: At what point would a piece of software, even if this "Handmade" philosophy is followed as closely as possible in terms of programming quality and effort optimising the code in the language and toolset you are using, not in fact be "Handmade" because the language and toolset you are using is mostly not you and instead a trunk full of third-party libraries mashed together to create a result?