If he wants to advance in the game space then he can either keep in the "visual coding" area using something like https://www.construct.net/en or start heading down the text coding path with https://godotengine.org/ or https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

100% agree with you... taking the time to do/go design first greatly improves the quality of the final API...

But as some comments below point out, an OpenAPI spec is a pain to create manually which is why TypeSpec from Microsoft is such a great tool. Lets you focus on the important bits of creating a solid API (model, consistency, best practices) in an easy to use DSL that spits out a fully documented OpenAPI spec to build against! see https://typespec.io/

I have a bunch of plant examples here http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/tags/l-systems/

The link to Laurens Lapre's LPARSER is dead. Is there a more up-to-date one? I couldn't find it with a brief search.

mmm, I have it on disk from a POVRay book I bought like 20+ years ago.... I wonder if the Internet Archive has it ???

I've had an "architect" job in some form or another for 20+ years, so have learnt plenty of things that would have greatly surprised my younger self...

My day job is basically to be a "force multiplier" and it boils down to:

- cat herding = meetings, discussions, negotiation, "shoulder to cry on" = way more soft skills then I ever thought I'd need

- Big picture stuff = "town planning" for tech, second order thinking, pulling together cohesive plans/strategies, principles, constraints = way harder to effectively communicate this stuff than my younger stuff would have thought

- rapid altitude changes = dropping from the 10000ft view down to helping a team troubleshoot some production issue, helping a junior dev with a code issue, solving a dispute between devs, hands on evaluation of some new tech, then jumping back up to talk to a leadership team about some new grand strategy, or to planning out a multi year program of work = a ton of skills that my younger self would have never have guessed at, finance, budgets, "business" language, operating models along with keeping my technical skills sharp

In terms of resources:

- Anything around learning to story tell and communicate effectively

- The "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know" essays

- Your tech skills - write PoC apps, side-projects, try out new tech, learn to quickly grok strengths & weaknesses of tech

I did the same thing on a road trip when I was bored... Worked really well.. created a video on the experience https://youtu.be/FxQpRoZI3kM

* The Web didn't really exist so no phoning a million stackoverflow friends for help and code snippets. So...

* Reference manuals shipped with compiler and good reference books were gold

* You could learn the entire API/SDK/Framework and keep it in your head

* Blocks of assembly were a legit way to improve your code's performance

* OOP was hitting mainstream along with all the new ideas and approaches (and pain) it entailed

* Turbo Pascal rocked for DOS development

* Source control was iffy/non-existent

* I loved it

Sounds like an Omega Race clone/variant

Apparently I "sit in my office and talk to robots all day" according to my slightly scathing 10year old son.

I bet his friends are impressed you work with robots! BTW, what do you do?

A mix of stuff. Being coding 40+ years, 30 of those as a job. Currently I do 3 days a week working as a solutions architect, herding cats for a large grocery chain. 2 days a week I work for an R&D team for a company building digital people, doing hands on coding, ML, NLP etc etc... hence the talking to robots :)

Sounds fun! I would love to work for an R&D team that actually produces something. (I only "produce" data pipelines and analysis.) Sounds like I only need 20 more years of coding experience!

Is this issue also related? https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/issues/9606

TIC-80 isn't quite as refined as PICO-8 but its still pretty awesome. A few months ago I figured out how to setup TIC-80 so I could code on my mobile whilst on the move: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxQpRoZI3kM