A funny post on BoingBoing regarding yet another thing Hollywood consistently gets wrong – writing computer code. I agree with most of the original post, and always laugh at how programming is portrayed in such “great” films as The Net, Hackers, and Swordfish, but there is one point on which I disagree:
“4. Code is not three dimensional
Remember in “hackers” when the gibson is depicted as a three dimensional city that the hackers must navigate through? Bullshit! We may use a dash of color in our shell to make things a bit clearer, but last I checked my terminal app doesn’t require OpenGL. I’m working here, bitches – I’m not playing quake.”
Obviously, this guy hasn’t been programming inside of Second Life. It truly is a new experience to be writing object-oriented code that is actually interacting with three-dimensional rendered objects. It is definitely not “playing quake”, but the skills I honed during my youth playing FPS games have definitely come in handy.
You can learn more about writing code “hollywood style” for virtual words through the Second Life Scripting page.