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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"At the same time, the level of hype about ECS today reminds me an awful lot of the amount of hype surrounding OOP in the 90s."

I appreciate that most of the ECS hype has been around specific use cases, though.

OOP was claimed as not a specific useful tool, but the answer to all programming, a billing it has not lived up to. It achieved "useful tool", no question, especially as some of the very rough bits were sanded off the original proposals (particularly the idea that objects should only and exactly match real world objects, an idea which I believe in hindsight was accidentally carried over from a simulation worldview in Simula where maybe it worked into the general programming world where it didn't), but it certainly has failed to be the one true programming methdology.

I haven't seen anyone claiming everything should be rewritten in ECS.

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> I appreciate that most of the ECS hype has been around specific use cases, though.

I recently watched the first 30 minutes of Mike Acton's 2014 talk, and while that portion of the talk wasn't about ECS specifically, it very much presented an absolutist perspective.

This is a issue with how most potential solutions or languages are marketed, even to experienced developers. They're all sold as silver bullets and every experienced programmer should know that there is no such thing.

A lot of it also stems from what I call 'the hello world problem'. Very simple cases are brought up to sell you on the idea, but it's only in complex scenarios that you really learn the worth of something.

The biggest issue is that it's a mischaracterization of the talk.

He spent quite a bit of time at the start of the talk defining the context w/i which he was talking. He used strong language but it was never absolutist.

> I appreciate that most of the ECS hype has been around specific use cases, though.

Depends a lot on where you hang out. On amateur gamedev fora, I have seen many many many posts from beginners where they are struggling to cram ECS into their game and feel they need to because it's simply "the way" that one architects a game. Even if their game is written in a language that offers no performance benefits and the their simulation benefits nothing from it, they just think they have to.

It's heartbreaking watching someone go, "I know I could just store this piece of data right here in my entity class, but I'm not supposed to because of DoD, so how should I do this?" And then they get back confidence answers that involve pages of code and unnecessary systems.

It's exactly like the OOP fad of the 90s, just in the opposite direction. Yes, it turned out you don't need to encapsulate all data in classes. But, also, it is OK to just store data in stuff. You don't have to make every letter of your pop-up dialog a separate component.

OOP even got mixed with databases to form nasty hype around ORMs and NoSQL.

But to their credit, there was a feature gap in SQL before jsonb was added.

"At the same time, the level of hype about ECS today reminds me an awful lot of the amount of hype surrounding OOP in the 90s."

I try not to focus too much on the ECS side. It is all about understand the problem you need to solve. If you are making a game, and you know exactly what the game needs to do from a programming perspective... write it.

Yes, while I would keep the "data oriented" viewpoint... but do you really need to spent time on some ECS layer? If you know exactly what each character in the game does, write it and solve it. Are you making a game... or trying to create the next Unreal Engine?

When you have a hammer, everything looks like thumbs

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