[jayshua]

I think it's important to note a couple of things about this.

First, Casey offers refunds on the handmade website for anyone who purchased the pre-order. Second, the pre-orders were primarily purchased by people who wanted to get the in-progress source code of the project, not people who just wanted to get the finished game. I'm not aware of anyone who purchased the pre-order solely to get the finished game itself. (Though it's certainly possible that there were some people.) Whether that makes a difference is up to the reader I suppose, since the original versions of the site didn't say anything about how likely the project was to finish and did state that the pre-order was for both the source-code and the finished game.

Second, the ten-year timeline (I believe the live streams only spanned 8 years) should be taken with the the note that this is live streaming for just one hour per day on weekdays, or for two hours two or three times a week later in the project. There's roughly 1000 hours of video content not including the Q&As at the end of every video. The 1000 hours includes instructional content and white board explanations in addition to the actual coding which was done while explaining the code itself as it was written. (Also, he wrote literally everything from scratch, something which he stated multiple times probably doesn't make sense in a real project.)

Taking into account the non-coding content, and the slower rate of coding while explaining what is being written, I'd estimate somewhere between 2-4 months of actual (40hr/week) work was completed, which includes both a software and a hardware renderer. No idea how accurate that estimate is, but it's definitely far less than 10 years and doesn't seem very indicative that the coding style he was trying to teach is untenable for game projects. (To be clear, it might be untenable. I don't know. I just don't see how the results of the Handmade Hero project specifically are indicative either way.)

[anonnon]

Look, for whatever reason, he's not good at finishing what he starts: https://www.destructoid.com/he-worked-on-it-for-three-years-...

How much of that is due to the programming practices he espouses, I'm not sure. Ironically, if he went all-in on OOP with Smalltalk, I could see the super productivity that environment provides actually making it harder for him to finish anything, given how much it facilitates prototyping and wheel-reinvention. You see this with Pharo, where they rewrite the class browser (and other tools) every 2-3 years.

But his track record doesn't support the reputation he's built for himself.

> for game projects

That's the problem. Casey holds up a small problem domain, like AAA games, where OOP's overhead (even C++'s OOP) may genuinely pose a real performance problem, and suggests that it's representative of software as a whole; as if vtables are the reason VisualStudio takes minutes to load today vs. seconds 20 years ago.

[zaphos]

The article you linked indicates the reason for him not finishing is specifically that he didn't like his game design, which seems orthogonal to coding practices.

He appears to have shipped middleware projects for RAD, and other contract work where he was not in charge of game design.

[Nimitz14]

Think the microsoft terminal saga shows a pretty clear track record.