Half of google’s engineers are 3D graphics aficionados and can make compelling 3D scenes? There’s a scale of programmer out there: and whatever that scale is for you I put those who canary physics and computer graphics at the top.
Given your nickname that reads like you would put yourself at the top. Programming is programming. I've done 3D graphics, real time machine control, OS development, device drivers, game engines and whatever else I've come across in my professional career to date and none of it struck me as being on a different scale as other software development: it all boils down to meticulously specifying your thinking to a machine so that it can repeat what you dreamed up at a much higher speed than a human ever could.
The person that comes up with a sorting algorithm is not on some different scale than the person that makes a game or controls a machine. BTW, I'm not quite sure how to interpret the bird in your sentence.
You’re also the first in a very long time to figure out where my handle comes from. I was so intrigued by reading about the first graphics card capable of hardware transform and lighting (GeForce 256)
I built a device driver for the BBC micro for one of the earliest 2D graphics accelerators. Computer graphics and acceleration are super interesting sub-fields.
I used that exact card to do real time rendering of simulated toolpaths for a 3D mill. That was mind-blowing at the time, to have an array of voxels large enough that you could do something meaningful with it and to be able to display the results as it was running.
