Re: Is RPG dying

You may want to review that chart. If you look at the trend line,
dynamically typed languages look to have peaked sometime last year.
This may be a statistical anomaly, but the trend has definitely leveled
off, and there are a lot of reasons for that.

I guess it depends on how you look at the chart and only time will tell.
To me it seems that chart is gradually trending upward for dynamically
typed languages. I suppose I see the recent tick downward as more of
an anomaly than a trend. The chart shows plenty of ups and downs.

Why an anomaly? Well, Apple did scare people last year when they were
planning to ban the use of scripting engines for iPhone and iPad. They
have since back peddled, primarily because games usually have scripting
languages built in for level design and such (by the way, keep an eye on
Lua - just Google "Lua on Tiobe" if you don't believe me).

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.

Dynamically typed languages make it very easy to write unmaintainable

code.

I agree that it can lead to debugging nightmares and you have to be careful
with dynamically typed languages. No argument there.



On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 1:22 PM, Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

On 3/15/2012 9:58 AM, Matt Lavinder wrote:

If you look at
TIOBE, dynamically typed languages (which are often scripting languages)
are on a steady, but gradual, rise.

You may want to review that chart. If you look at the trend line,
dynamically typed languages look to have peaked sometime last year.
This may be a statistical anomaly, but the trend has definitely leveled
off, and there are a lot of reasons for that. Dynamically typed
languages make it very easy to write unmaintainable code. I;m not
saying that good programmers write unmaintainable code in dynamically
typed languages, but I'm saying that dynamically typed languages make it
easier for those with bad programming skills to develop applications.
And the result is you end up with unmaintainable systems.

Joe
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