They haven't been popular as games on their own, but there is an "ancient" legacy genre of games designed to played via code, sometimes even competitively. The

They haven't been popular as games on their own, but there is an "ancient" legacy genre of games designed to played via code, sometimes even competitively. The competitive ones especially have a rich history and often have themes of robot fights/robot battling/robot wars. Several major early, famous Kickstarters were "teach programming as a game" games such as Codemancer and (board game) Robot Turtles. It will likely never be a mainstream thing in games. There are too many risks that giving access to programming scripts inside of games might accidentally "ruin" the intended experience: both in terms of users automating a game too much and finding it boring, and in users finding exploits and hacking the game into unintended states. Still, it's always great to see explorations of it even if it is kept mostly to its own mini-genre. I know that some of the programming-inspired puzzles in The Castle of Dr. Brain and the Island of Dr. Brain were quite influential to me at certain ages.