Which programming language did you choose and why?

[J1M]

Are those products actually built with python though? The other arguments I am hearing sound like someone's NPC programming is 5 years out of date. The JavaScript programmer union now agrees that compilers and typing are good after being forced to use TypeScript.

The reason I ask is because I have heard YouTube had its Python rewritten in Go. Maybe someone who cares more can verify how common this is.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

I could see how anyone could hate strong typing after being forced to use Typescript

 

[Rincewind]

I could see how anyone could hate strong typing after being forced to use Typescript

Huh? TypeScript is a strongly typed language—it's even in the name! TypeScript is actually quite sane if you use it properly. It has a few nifty things (e.g. structural typing and union types) that other type systems could learn a thing or two from.

Having said that, I saw TypeScript projects written by JavaScript guys who didn't quite grasp it and made a horrible mess...

 

[Arbiter]

I know people whine about C++ and go "but muh vtable", but they are engaging in the same CPU-cycle counting that I hate.

Typical web apps are I/O bound so the common perception is that CPU performance is not that important. In some cases, however, cycle counting does make sense:
- non trivial mobile apps - the faster your app runs, the longer the battery lasts
- huge websites like Google, Facebook with thousands of servers - if you make your code 1% faster, it translates to millions of savings
- app instances started on demand, e.g. dynamic scaling, functions - you want new instances to start as quickly as possible to limit delay in processing. This might make the overhead of interpreted code or JIT undesirable.

If they really hate vtables that much they can just not use inheritance since IIRC C++ doesn't generate vtables at all if you don't have any virtual functions.

If you abandon polymorphism, there is little difference between C++ OO code and C structural programming, unless you are using templates heavily.

 

[ds]

If you abandon polymorphism, there is little difference between C++ OO code and C structural programming, unless you are using templates heavily.

You don't need to use templates heavily yourself to benefit from them. Having standard containers and algorithms that you can put your custom types into without a bunch of unsafe casting is huge. But even without templates, destructors alone make C++ infinitely more ergonomic than C.

Also, virtual inheritance is only one form of polymorphism in C++, there are also function overloads which don't have any runtime overhead. And yes, templates too.

 

[Arbiter]

I lack experience with large-scale projects written in dynamic languages, but I'd be interested in giving them a go with an open mind and experiencing their particular tradeoffs in a real-world scenario

In my opinion dynamic typing only works well with small 1-man projects.

As soon as you write code that is meant to be used by other programmers, you have to document parameters and return values, you cannot expect users of your routines/library/framework to guess what parameters need to be passed to make the code work. Take a look at the documentation of a sample NodeJS procedure: https://nodejs.org/api/fs.html#filehandlereadbuffer-options. All params and return value are thoroughly documented, including their types. Once you start writing detailed documentation like that, there is really no difference between your code comments and specifying types in method signatures, as required by statically typed languages. And the latter have the advantage of basic checks being performed by the compiler.

 

[OndrejSc]

 

[Arbiter]

Worst case, you can write a simple shell script to handle most build cases.

My problem isn't that these systems are useless, it's that they do a relatively simple job in the most complicated, bloated, and difficult to use way possible

At the very least every decent build system provides the following:
- incremental builds - only run tasks if their inputs or outputs have changed since the last run
- parallel execution of tasks in a proper order (i.e. a task can only start once its dependencies have been successfully executed, every task is only executed once)
- for statically typed languages, a build definition is a source of truth when it comes to thirdparty dependencies (e.g. libraries) the code needs to compile, making it trivial to import your project into an IDE
- most build systems come with an integrated package manager that can download libraries from remote repositories

More advanced systems also provide:
- caching of build results, including shared caches used by many developers and/or build agents
- distributed builds
- sandboxing - making sure that tasks do not depend on undeclared inputs, which would break caching and distributed builds

Also, unrelated, the problem with Python isn't it's speed.

Aren't you concerned with the carbon footprint of your code?

Spoiler

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

Worst case, you can write a simple shell script to handle most build cases.

My problem isn't that these systems are useless, it's that they do a relatively simple job in the most complicated, bloated, and difficult to use way possible

At the very least every decent build system provides the following:
- incremental builds - only run tasks if their inputs or outputs have changed since the last run
- parallel execution of tasks in a proper order (i.e. a task can only start once its dependencies have been successfully executed, every task is only executed once)
- for statically typed languages, a build definition is a source of truth when it comes to thirdparty dependencies (e.g. libraries) the code needs to compile, making it trivial to import your project into an IDE
- most build systems come with an integrated package manager that can download libraries from remote repositories

Make does all of these except the last one, and isn't a total chore to use unlike the rest.

The fact that make can get you 90% of the way and is simple and just works vs cmake needing endless configuring and barely working for the same overall outcome shows how bad most build systems are.

I'm not against build systems in general, but there's no good reason to ever use cmake, Gradle, or many of the large-scale build tools in most projects, and they frequently get in the way to the point where I simply don't contribute to projects that use cmake because I don't want to spend the hours getting it working properly for every project.

If your build system causes more problems than it solves, it's not worth it. Unfortunately I've found that's exactly what most build systems do.

 

[what am i doing]

If you abandon polymorphism, there is little difference between C++ OO code and C structural programming, unless you are using templates heavily.

Only reason this isn't the most retarded thing I've read for the past month is that I opened a Licorice thread the other day.

 

[Krice]

I find it kind of funny that we still don't have a better language than C/C++, for stuff like game development and generic software programming. I think C# is close, but I don't know. I don't like C#'s memory/resource management, it's confusing. Then again, maybe it just feels like that, because I have less experience programming in C#.

 

[Arbiter]

I find it kind of funny that we still don't have a better language than C/C++, for stuff like game development and generic software programming. I think C# is close, but I don't know. I don't like C#'s memory/resource management, it's confusing. Then again, maybe it just feels like that, because I have less experience programming in C#.

Rust is a viable replacement for C/C++ is many domains, but it is not popular in gamedev (yet).

 

[Krice]

I think Rust developers are trying to destroy the language, but I didn't like it anyway.

 

[OndrejSc]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Language

The standard "Hello, World!" program:

Do Not Adieu, a play in two acts.

Romeo, a young man with a remarkable patience.
Juliet, a likewise young woman of remarkable grace.
Ophelia, a remarkable woman much in dispute with Hamlet.
Hamlet, the flatterer of Andersen Insulting A/S.

Act I: Hamlet's insults and flattery.

Scene I: The insulting of Romeo.

[Enter Hamlet and Romeo]

Hamlet:
You lying stupid fatherless big smelly half-witted coward!
You are as stupid as the difference between a handsome rich brave
hero and thyself! Speak your mind!

You are as brave as the sum of your fat little stuffed misused dusty
old rotten codpiece and a beautiful fair warm peaceful sunny summer's
day. You are as healthy as the difference between the sum of the
sweetest reddest rose and my father and yourself! Speak your mind!

You are as cowardly as the sum of yourself and the difference
between a big mighty proud kingdom and a horse. Speak your mind.

Speak your mind!

[Exit Romeo]

Scene II: The praising of Juliet.

[Enter Juliet]

Hamlet:
Thou art as sweet as the sum of the sum of Romeo and his horse and his
black cat! Speak thy mind!

[Exit Juliet]

Scene III: The praising of Ophelia.

[Enter Ophelia]

Hamlet:

Thou art as beautiful as the difference between Romeo and the square
of a huge green peaceful tree. Speak thy mind!

Thou art as lovely as the product of a large rural town and my amazing
bottomless embroidered purse. Speak thy mind!

Thou art as loving as the product of the bluest clearest sweetest sky
and the sum of a squirrel and a white horse. Thou art as beautiful as
the difference between Juliet and thyself. Speak thy mind!

[Exeunt Ophelia and Hamlet]

Act II: Behind Hamlet's back.

Scene I: Romeo and Juliet's conversation.

[Enter Romeo and Juliet]

Romeo:
Speak your mind. You are as worried as the sum of yourself and the
difference between my small smooth hamster and my nose. Speak your
mind!

Juliet:
Speak YOUR mind! You are as bad as Hamlet! You are as small as the
difference between the square of the difference between my little pony
and your big hairy hound and the cube of your sorry little
codpiece. Speak your mind!

[Exit Romeo]

Scene II: Juliet and Ophelia's conversation.

[Enter Ophelia]

Juliet:
Thou art as good as the quotient between Romeo and the sum of a small
furry animal and a leech. Speak your mind!

Ophelia:
Thou art as disgusting as the quotient between Romeo and twice the
difference between a mistletoe and an oozing infected blister! Speak
your mind!

[Exeunt]

 

[beardalaxy]

Ever since I was little, I wanted to make video games. Growing up with them and being really interested in them, it was natural. When I was 10 we finally had a computer and internet so I started researching how I could make games. Ended up with a bootleg version of RPG Maker XP and the rest is history. I've been using RPG Maker ever since. I've tried other stuff such as Game Maker, Unity, Unreal, FPS Creator, and a few other smaller ones. Nothing just ever meshed as well as RPG Maker does. The UI of RM is just second to none. It's extremely intuitive.

RPG Maker XP through VX Ace all used RGSS; Ruby Game Scripting System. I worked with XP for so long that I actually did start learning the coding side of it, and ended up making a menu system for 1 character instead of an entire party completely from scratch, which I ended up using in a game jam game that was admittedly subpar (learned a lot from that though). MV and MZ both use Javascript, and while I haven't learned it to the extent of how much I learned of RGSS, I find it really easy to work with and edit things I need to.

I'm not too great at writing code from scratch, but I am pretty good at being able to interpret code and modify it as I get familiar with it, no matter what language it's in. I'm sure something like Assembly would be a lot harder but I've done stuff with Javascript, Rust, Python, and C#. Nothing too crazy, just changing some things here and there to suit my needs more, or just stretching my brain and trying to experiment. A lot of the basics transfer over to other things so editing code is pretty easy once you get a general idea of what coding is. It's a little bit like being pretty knowledgeable of the English language, so when you see words with similar roots in other languages that derive from the same places English words do, you can understand the meaning of them still.

I will say that once I'm done with my current game, my next game will likely be in RPG Maker as well, but during the development of that I plan to look into some other engines that have been maturing a lot more in recent times, such as Godot and Construct. Just want to see how well I work with them. A bit of a problem I have is that, since I've used RPG Maker for so long (17 years!!) I'm very knowledgeable on how to use the engine and with all the ideas for games I have, it's a lot easier to just keep making them in RM instead of learning a new engine and having that learning time cut into development time. I'm interested in other stuff though, even if just to fiddle around with new things.

 

[Adeptus]

I am not a coder, but rather a (novice) writer who wants to create interactive stories with game elements, so I choose Twine. And I recommend it for other people like me.

 

[Gammer]

 

[Maxie]

This is very correct. Only senior C programmers are able to afford hormone therapy without beggaring their parents.

 

[Hag]

Kind of surprised to see Stallman there.

 

[StippleAlpha]

C++ because:

• Great compiler optimizations. Most compilers will see through to what you're trying to do and turn it into efficient machine code.
• Expansive and versatile standard library (also well-optimized in most implementations).
• Can compile even for low-level embedded targets.
• Well-written code will turn would-be runtime errors into compile-time errors.
• None of that garbage collection-crap. I manage my code by scope, which all modern C++ should do.
• Flex on lesser nerds

C lacks some of these advantages, but it's still the best low-level languages. Every programmer should know C. Don't "at" me. Just because you use a miter saw and router doesn't mean you shouldn't be familiar with a backsaw and chisels.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Python > whatever language you like.

 

[Monk]

I was able to take only Pascal as part of a business degree, but was told that it's a good foundation for learning other languages. I think that helped me learn C, and using the same Kernighan and Ritchie book, as well as writing simple code for xBase management and spreadsheets.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Any procedural/OOP language is a good foundation, the basics are all the same, but programming in Pascal is like driving a 1920s roadster, compared to a 1950s landwhale (Java, C#), compared to a 2020 Bugatti Veyron (Python, Ruby). Do you want to spend 2 weeks coding a little thing, or 20 minutes?

 

[TheCumGuzzler]

I find it kind of funny that we still don't have a better language than C/C++, for stuff like game development and generic software programming. I think C# is close, but I don't know. I don't like C#'s memory/resource management, it's confusing. Then again, maybe it just feels like that, because I have less experience programming in C#.

Rust is a viable replacement for C/C++ is many domains, but it is not popular in gamedev (yet).

Bracket-lib for traditional roguelikes is decent, I just hate the Rust community because of the faggotry.

 

[GamingConnoisseur]

I've been coding in Java for a while and really love IntelliJ. What's the equivalent IDE for C++? I'll be jumping to learning C++ soon.