Dave Plummer

It is.

What I love about it though, and I'm sure you've had this experience where sometimes you design a piece of software and it's complex and you get it working in your head and you get the plumbing working and you know how it's going to run and flow and then eventually you write the code and the code does that thing that you had pictured in your head.

Mm-hmm.

And now there are billions of copies of that thing that I had in my head running on millions of people or billions of people's machines.

And that in itself is really cool to me.

It's not a vanity thing so much as a I'm impressed by it, I guess.

How's your programming evolved over the years?

I take a lot more care in complexity these days.

So it used to be you would write code and just keep writing code, writing code, and then at some point go back and clean it up.

Well, I write the other way now.

I try to write really clean initial skeletal code and then flesh it out because I have been involved in too many projects of my own and of other people's makings where things get so messed up that they're just not fixable.

And so sometimes the work you put in up front pays off, you know.

For me, it's been C++ and assembly language.

Yeah, right now I'm 100% Lua and Python, but that's just a side project I'm working on.

What I'm doing is I wanted to build an AI to play the game Tempest.

That's the old Atari game Tempest.

And this is a game that I actually hold the world record on.

From 1980.

And it's a very complex game.

You've got full 360 degrees of motion.