> The scripting languages of the future I see more in things like Unreal Blueprints.
A lot of people have an aversion for anything visual programming. Usually when someone mentions Blueprints (here or on r/gamedev on reddit) I see a whole slew of replies talking about how bad it is, how nobody makes any real things with it[1] and how visual programming is terrible. Of course, they're all programmers who forget that textual programming isn't for everyone and that visual languages are extremely successful in other fields (especially for artists and musicians).
I'm a programmer with ~20 years of textual language programming under my belt, but I spent a few months with Max/MSP and personally, I loved it. I'm a very visual thinker, I often think on paper or whiteboards with boxes and lines and I found that when using Max, I could skip this thinking step and go directly to code. Sure, its not for everyone, but for me, it was a very pleasant experience.
Yes, Max isn't a good replacement for a general purpose programming language and Blueprints apparently also has its warts, but they are extremely useful and successful and I do agree that we will see more like this in the future. I do feel that a good general purpose visual language could be created[2] Even Blender is moving that direction with its "nodes everywhere" thing.
[2] At the time, my big complaints with Max were lack of general purpose data structures (and reference types allowing you to build stuff like trees yourself -- although you could write C/C++ extensions and presumably create such things there), no tools for unit testing etc, afaik its added a bunch of data structures since so maybe its a lot closer now?
dkersten|4 years ago
A lot of people have an aversion for anything visual programming. Usually when someone mentions Blueprints (here or on r/gamedev on reddit) I see a whole slew of replies talking about how bad it is, how nobody makes any real things with it[1] and how visual programming is terrible. Of course, they're all programmers who forget that textual programming isn't for everyone and that visual languages are extremely successful in other fields (especially for artists and musicians).
I'm a programmer with ~20 years of textual language programming under my belt, but I spent a few months with Max/MSP and personally, I loved it. I'm a very visual thinker, I often think on paper or whiteboards with boxes and lines and I found that when using Max, I could skip this thinking step and go directly to code. Sure, its not for everyone, but for me, it was a very pleasant experience.
Yes, Max isn't a good replacement for a general purpose programming language and Blueprints apparently also has its warts, but they are extremely useful and successful and I do agree that we will see more like this in the future. I do feel that a good general purpose visual language could be created[2] Even Blender is moving that direction with its "nodes everywhere" thing.
[1] Despite projects like this being written entirely in Blueprints: https://www.youtube.com/c/RaymondCripps Also the Bloodborne PS1 demake: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaxcBWED_UhcjhoG7nUeUoA
[2] At the time, my big complaints with Max were lack of general purpose data structures (and reference types allowing you to build stuff like trees yourself -- although you could write C/C++ extensions and presumably create such things there), no tools for unit testing etc, afaik its added a bunch of data structures since so maybe its a lot closer now?