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>and lua is used by game artists utterly uninterested in programming to express level design Rather short sighted and dismissive to a successful programming la
by pull_my_finger 5y ago
>and lua is used by game artists utterly uninterested in programming to express level design
Rather short sighted and dismissive to a successful programming language that's evolved over 20+ years. Lua is a great general purpose programming language that specializes not in "game making for non-programmers" but in ease of embedding, extension/extensability, and data description (like a config language). There's a whole section in Programming in Lua[1] to that effect. The fact that it's frequently used in games is credit to it's speed, size and great C API for embedding, not because of any particular catering to game designers.
[1]: https://www.lua.org/pil/10.1.html https://www.lua.org/pil/10.1.html
- Banana699 5y agoYou misunderstood me. I love lua and I wasn't being dismissive of it, I was using the first example that came to my mind to counter the claim that a convenient language has to be messy. Just because that was the example used doens't mean there is an implicit "and that's the only thing it's good for" clause I'm implying there: if someone said "Python is used by scientists utterly uninterested in programming to express numerical algorithms" would you understand that to be a dismissive remark against Python ? Being used by non-programmers utterly uninterested in programming to solve problems is the highest honor any programming language can ever attain, because it means that the language is well-suited to the domain enough (or flexible enough to be made so) that describing problems in it is no different than writing thoughts or design documents in natural language. This is the single most flattering thing you can ever say about a language, not a dismissive remark.