Re: My thoughts on C# and gaming.

> It's not just a popular language.  It's the dominant scripting
> language of the game industry, which means it is proven in that
> problem domain.  It's popular because it's easy to learn, easy to
> embed, and fast for an interpreted language.  So I'm not buying all
> this hand waving about how dev studios should avoid Lua because "it
> would take 10 devs a week to learn" or some nonsense like that.
> Especially in favor of C#; that only makes sense if the studio is
> already heavily into C# development.
>

Well, *dominant* and *ideal* can obviously be two different things in this
case.  If we were starting for scratch, I'd say that we would be likely
using Lua or Squirrel just to get something running.  But seeing how quickly
a *simple *scripting language can be pushed to its limits, and how some
people will prematurely throw them out and revert to C++ based solely
on *assumed
performance*, we wanted a solution that we could finally say with some
confidence "it is the code, not the language, causing the performance
problems."

As far as having 15 people learn Lua when they already know C++ pretty well,
I do not feel that we can easily dismiss that and just say "go learn Lua".
Yes, everyone could learn it, and we could spend a while trying to learn
what not to do, but in our case it was easier to teach things we already
knew and to hire people that were already familiar with what we were using.
I will say that we have had several times the number of applicants with C#
experience vs Lua.

I'm not trying to start a war over which is better, because I don't think
one is the "best".  But I do feel that it should be up to the group of
people that will be using it to decide based on what they feel will make
them more productive.

-Doug

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