Re: Is RPG dying

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 5:33 PM, Matt Lavinder
<mlavinder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

(by the way, keep an eye on
Lua - just Google "Lua on Tiobe" if you don't believe me).

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Lua.html

It has a stunning spike in 2011 (reaching #10), but has since fallen
back to where it was in 2010. Lua is a great language and certainly
deserves to be watched. Actually, if you want to make a case for
Lua's popularity, there are other sources (less fickle) than TIOBE
which do show that it is gaining.

For those who have never heard of Lua before, it should be noted that
Lua plays a prominent role in both World of Warcraft and Angry Birds.

That all said I don't want this to sound like a big
scripting language advocate.  I do like PHP but I
also like statically typed languages such as RPG
and C#.  I'd be hard pressed to say which I prefer.
I am more of a "right tool for the job" kind of guy.

I am a big scripting language advocate. Hopefully I can advocate for
them while still being reasonable. To me, the first thing to do is to
shift the perception of them as "scripting" languages. They are, for
the most part, general purpose languages that happen to be dynamically
typed. The big ones like Python, Perl, and Ruby in particular are
just as general purpose as Java. I think "right tool for the job" is
not a bad sentiment per se, but most people have a fairly narrow view
of what tools are right for which jobs. Most jobs have many, many
"right" tools. The set of jobs that scripting languages are good for
has a gigantic overlap with the set of jobs that Java is good for.
Much bigger than most people think.

John