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0 pointsdismalaf1y ago0 comments

Is it really philosophical?

Scripting means telling an already built piece of software what to do. In this case, the game engine code doesn't change, the programmer uses the existing functions and interface to tell it what to do. Even Unreal programming is mostly scripting... Yes you're writing C++ but you're only telling the engine what to do, not rewriting it (well, unless you are).

It's why scripting languages are called such... The interpreter is already built and remains unchanged, and runs the code without rebuilding anything.

Python doesn't suddenly become a non-scripting language just because your program reaches a certain size or scope.

It's weird that someone would take offence to calling scripting scripting... Like, it's nice that things are prebuilt and make programming easier... I reach for Ruby first whenever I have a problem I need solved.

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johnnyanmac1y ago

Maybe "philosophical" is too strong a word, but I can't think of a better fitting term.

By those same definitions, we can Call any kind of middleware an API "scripting". You're not changing the underlying code so much as sending calls to some other code base to do the heavy lifting. But there's definitely some like between that and what popular game engines are structured by.

At the end of the day, the names are bikeshedding to me, what matters more is the output and experience of the tool more than the label applied to it. But names are communication, and communication is messy by nature.

littlestymaar1y ago

> Scripting means telling an already built piece of software what to do. In this case, the game engine code doesn't change, the programmer uses the existing functions and interface to tell it what to do.

By this lose definition pretty much all of software engineering is scripting: you're always telling the underlying layer what to do without changing it: be it a web framework or the GPU driver.

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