I know, it's a good thing nobody is trying to get that popularized.

Yeah, it seems to me this is more of a "The service being offered did not fit our needs, so we have ceased using it.". This is hardly a statement about how horrible walled gardens and sandboxes are. He even says it's a good solution for new Mac-only developers.

Sounds like libel, especially since they are not making any money off it. They should get in contact with the ACLU.

Also, very classy of the NYPD to do a public smearing of people who show their abuses to the public. They'll happily invade your privacy at random, but don't you dare film them while they abuse people on your dollar!

Nope, haven't you heard, Objective-C is like, slow and junk, so obviously it's useless. Slow languages should be banned. It's also maintained by Apple, so obviously it's pure evil. If you were a Real Programmer (TM) you would use C++ because it's super fast and because you can't write games in a slow language amirite?

Am I in the Slashdot cool programmer's club yet? Do I have to bash Java and talk about how great C# is too?

In seriousness, objc is a fantastic language. The message dispatch slowness is vastly overstated, and compared to the amount of flexibility you get, when performance isn't critical, it is well worth it.

Clearly you haven't gotten the Nvidia memo. GPUs are magic. They can do anything and everything, if only programmers weren't so darned stupid.

What he needs is a project. It is far, far easier to learn a language by practice and discovery with some supplementary materials than by reading some book. Books aren't interesting. Writing plugins for a server running one of your favourite games is.

So find something that interests him and is extensible and start there. Language is irrelevant. It's just a matter of learning enough syntax to get started and then learning new things as you need them.

(My bias: I taught myself my first language, C++, by fixing bugs in a piece of open source game server software, a year after completely failing to learn it from C++ For Dummies.)

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Why would a flight from the UK to Canada go through American airspace? Or do they just control all of North America now?

Well, these are the same people who think that every pirated copy = a lost sale, so I wouldn't put it past them.

Yeah, nothing worse than "Sorry, we've arbitrarily decided that the game you purchased with your money and already installed on this computer is now unavailable for no particular reason. Please try again when the stars re-align."

I especially like their arrogance where they assume that any and all music being performed is copyrighted by them. They have no proof, but just assume that all the bands are doing covers. Because it isn't possible to write better music than Jay-Z and Coldplay (in the copyright troll's words).

Yeah, that's kind of the fucking point.

They fight hard against the kids they sue when they try to make excuses for their supposed acts of piracy, but will probably make excuses for their own supposed act of piracy. That's the irony here. Sorry it got lost on you.

You seriously think they just killed people because they didn't believe in any gods? It wasn't because of some sort of political ideology or despotic leader or anything...?

... because it has a small touch screen and a humble processor and doing those things on it would be incredibly awkward...?

Do you also chide Black & Decker because you can't browse the web on your coffee maker?

Or printed, placed on a wooden desk, photographed, pasted into Microsoft Word, and then saved as HTML?

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Web_0_0x2e_1.aspx

There is only 2 unreachable puzzle pieces in Braid, if I remember correctly. They're in the first chapter, interestingly enough (maybe not such a good design decision, but anyway...) and the reason they're unreachable is because you need to get the other pieces of the same chapter to make a platform.

If it took you 2 hours to execute a puzzle once you had it figured it out, either you aren't good at platformers or you were doing it wrong. True, some of the puzzles are incredibly difficult, but the more difficult, the more rewarding.

In order to reach the end of the game (actually the beginning of the story if you pay attention) you need to collect all the puzzle pieces, so no, you don't reach the end first.

And I thought getting thrown into the game was actually a brilliant move on behalf of Blow. Rather than having to sit through a 5 minute intro video or some tutorial level, the game is put right in front of you and wastes none of your time. Not something you see in games very often.

I honestly can't say why you thought you would get new powers and use them on previous puzzles. The only instance where you have to go back, you don't get new powers. So you made an incorrect assumption due in no part to the design of the game, and then blame the designer.

For a game that was basically designed and implemented by a single person, I thought it was incredibly smooth and polished, and one of my favourite puzzle games.