Maybe you should just give up

Light switches are a bad example. Up doesn’t mean on and down doesn’t mean off when you have multiple switches for the same thing.

These switches visibly have 2 states and switching it means you want the other one. In tech it’s less obvious that there are only two states and that toggling the button will do something in particular. Recall the play and pause button on your media app. That button could change the state in any number of ways but in order to convey to the user what will happen BEFORE the button is pressed, the player shows what action will take place.

You’re already in the current state, that rarely adds info. Toggles should indicate what they will do.

What about processes that terminate before writing the whole thing? You can’t protect against everything. Blame other processes all you want but the language spec allows for confusion.

TOML and YAML both have the problem that if you receive an incomplete document, there’s a decent chance you can’t tell. JSON doesn’t have that because of the closing curly.

The game is “The Day Before”

I’ve been cooking up an idea for a smaller style MMO with as few NPCs as possible. It’d take a large skill tree in which you can’t possibly put points into everything so people have to specialize and work together. NPCs might fill in jobs while a player is offline like taking sales at the store or unattended crafting but all quests and rewards come from other players. Something unavoidable is that I think there has to be an end or else people either 1) can branch out and become so skilled they don’t need other people or 2) stagnate. So after X real world days, an apocalypse happens. Plague, dragon attack, aliens, zombies, blight, pirates, whatever. If you win, you can rebuild and get a benefit before your next go around. If you lose, you migrate to a new place (generate a new map) and try again.

This, or something close to it, is sometimes called cluttering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluttering

Memorization of pure functions can make a WORLD of difference. It’s just not as easy as it should be.