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Comment by ralfd | Hacker News Reader

Summary of the video please?

Jonathan Blow criticizes the use of scripting languages in modern game development as outdated and inefficient, pointing out that they slow down performance, are error-prone, and complicate the development process with extensive engine integration needs. He notes that while initially appealing for allowing quick iterations and non-programmer accessibility, scripting languages often result in poor quality, bug-ridden code that requires significant oversight from professional programmers. Advocating for robust, compiled languages like C++, Blow dismisses scripting languages as a failed experiment and praises the shift towards more constrained and user-friendly visual scripting systems in platforms like Unreal and Unity.

(i don't mean to suggest that i agree with him, I just was curious)

Interesting. I feel like his opinion makes sense for first party code, but what if you want to support mods? I don't really have time to develop them anymore but I did a couple in QuakeC back in the day (I'm old) and really enjoyed it. IIRC it had lots of domain specific niceties like native vector types. One slightly hilarious thing is any loop that looped more than 100k times was killed with an infinite loop error. Actually saved me a couple of times.

I feel like if there was a nice modern statically typed language that was easy to embed I would go with that. Something like Dart maybe. But I don't think that's easy to integrate.

Was a lot of the functionality of Quake done in QuakeC or was that scripting language added for the sole purpose of allowing for mods to the game?.

I think scripting languages are a very bad idea for the core functionality of a game and I see no benefit to them. If its done after you have nailed down all your core mechanics and just want to add mod support for things such as player created maps then I think that's fine.

That means that a scripting language should only be added towards the very end of a project. Adding it towards the beginning when you don't even know your core mechanics yet seems crazy to me since I see no benefit to it.

The engine was all C. QuakeC was used to script the game logic - how weapons behave, doors open, items move around, etc. It was reasonably powerful. You could make grappling hooks, proximity mines, etc.

I guess the core mechanics of Quake were very obvious. It wasn't a very innovative game in that sense; basically identical to Doom but with way fancier graphics, controls and so on.

QuakeC was powerful enough to create mods like Quess (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD2Qz_hH2U4) and Quake Rally (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg0hTSLE-NM). Although the latter was really pushing the limits of the engine.

And lest we forget, Reaper Bot, the thing that made PvE deathmatch a reality.

To this day I'm amazed that so much cool stuff was done in QuakeC despite the language not even having arrays...

Never made a game (want to!) but I would think that scripting language support would be downright fantastic for E2E testing.

The .NET runtime[1] and C# compiler[2] are both pretty easy to embed.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/netc...

[2] https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/docs/wiki/Scripti...

Play any Bethesda game and you understand his points about designing your games to be largely scripted by less experienced programmers is error proned.

At the same time, the success of Bethesda games despite these bugs is an argument against it mattering all that much. Not to mention mods, which doesn't really require a scripting engine but 100% lowers the barrier to entry for community creations.

> success of Bethesda games despite these bugs

Bethesda bugs are almost an endearing feature at this point. Weird stuff happening in the game for no discernible reason is part of the charm.

I feel like that is the same language design flamewar that has been going on for the last 40 years.

The arguments are all the same, neither side is any closer to winning.

Is this a GPT summary? It reads kinda like one

Is every flat yet informative summary going to be accused of GPT now?

And no, way too concise to be GPT imo

> And no, way too concise to be GPT imo

That is funny, it was GPT4 over the video transcript

damnit

"accused" implies that it's a bad thing. I see nothing wrong with using AI for summarization.

But I also see nothing wrong with someone wanting to know, as a general disclaimer, whether a given text was human- or AI-generated. The passage does read to me very much like GPT's college essay-like speech patterns.

Blow is pompous. Lately he pretends to be a mentor but he’s still immature and insufferable.

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