It's Turing-complete, what more do you want?
More seriously, DM is one of the best languages I've worked with. It's intuitive, clean, easy to read, and able to accomplish quite a lot with very little work. It's got an excellent system for inheritance, its got very useful in-built data structures (/list is /excellently/ designed.), and it's quite well documented. It has an active community.
It has it's niche, of course - you wouldn't be doing 3D or a real-time platformer or some sort of binary file-muncher in it, but DM is, IMHO, not a good language - it's a great language. This is coming from a C++ fanboy who considers Java and C-octothope to be weak languages for weak people.
Jp wrote:
It has it's niche, of course - ... Imagine what could be accomplished with this language if the amount of developer control was expanded a bit. :D | |
That could be great - or more realistically, a C++ compiler and set of libraries that let you use C++ code more similarly to DM (or Python) code. Actually, you may already be able to find something(s) like that. A C compiler could be made to interpret both braces-and-semicolons code as well as indentation-only code, like Dream Maker does. Then IIRC Garthor has mentioned on the forums a data-type implemented by a library that is similar to DM's /list. You can try to put together a DM-like C++ pack/suite with those kind of things. =P
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Kaioken wrote:
That could be great - or more realistically, a C++ compiler and set of libraries that let you use C++ code more similarly to DM (or Python) code. Actually, you may already be able to find something(s) like that. A C compiler could be made to interpret both braces-and-semicolons code as well as indentation-only code, like Dream Maker does. Then IIRC Garthor has mentioned on the forums a data-type implemented by a library that is similar to DM's /list. You can try to put together a DM-like C++ pack/suite with those kind of things. =P Yea... But still, trying to be like BYOND can only get so close. If you actually end up putting together a system that works decently closely to how BYONDs does, please let us know. :D | |
By and by, people cannot be trusted. Willingness to help is great, but how long that will last isn't certain. How long was Lummox a valuable member of the community before he was allowed to become a programmer?
Perhaps in the future things will change, and BYOND can take a more professional stance with development and start hiring more programmers. But until they get the resources to do so, it isn't likely, nor would it be a good idea.