[casual_games] languages... (that's an 's' at the end!)

[Phil Steinmeyer]

Yeah - I'm curious about claims of 25-50% decrease in coding time (cited by 
at least one other poster as well).

In my experience, assuming you've got a competent language with functions, 
OO, etc that you can put your most common code into, then overall code time 
is affected by
1) IDE (yes, you can usually use a 3rd party IDE, but a good, integrated IDE 
is better)
2) Debugger (if it's good in general and supports recompile on the fly, 
that's very good)
3) GUI layout tool (not as important for games, though, as most use custom 
GUIs to avoid 'Windows' look)
4) Flexibility in how you do things (i.e. I'm not restricted to one paradigm 
for accomplishing tasks)
5) Complexity of interaction with native APIs.  i.e. for games - fighting 
with Direct X and the Windows API.

I've tinkered with a few languages.  Using MSVC to write straight C/C++, my 
current preferred method, scores high on #1, #2, and #4, poor on #3, and 
fair on #5.  But I don't really see a way that another language could 
dramatically improve my coding time for complex games, as I spend very 
little of my coding time fighting with the tools or the paradigms the tools 
limits me to.

That said, I'm curious where others find 25-50% productivity gains in other 
languages (not trying to start a flame war - just curious, as it doesn't 
match my (limited) experiences with other languages).


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <johns at worldwinner.com>
To: "IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List" <casual_games at igda.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 8:44 AM
Subject: Re: [casual_games] languages... (that's an 's' at the end!)


> hi
>
> ( 05.10.06 19:31 -0400 ) Jim Perry:
>> 1) Decrease in coding time - typically between 25 and 50%
>
> why do you think this is?
>