Spinning Cubes
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I Code, Therefore it CTD

2014-04-01

In game development learning never stops so over the years I have used many programming languages. Some of them fun, some of them a pain and some makes me wake up at night screaming. If you are aiming to be a programmer it really do not matter what language you start with. You will try the others soon enough anyway. Lets start with the four I use at the moment.

C/C++
If there is some sort of primary language for me I guess it would be C++. I sometime think that I'm good with it. Then I look into any book by Scott Meyers and realize that I'm not. First compiler I used was Borland C++ and it took me two days to get a basic hello world program to compile. For now I use Visual C++ as a IDE and I code on ZeroFps with it.

Lua
Lua is a nice simple language that makes it easy to Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war. Nothing is private, global is king and when you use it on a larger project you can hear the sound of C++ programmers crying in the hallways of the office. I used it when I worked on Bionic Commando, Magicka 2 and as a scripting language in ZeroFps.

Python
Language for those that like there code to look neat. Most languages do not care where you put newlines or withespace but python does. I used it for tools and as a scripting language in ZeroFps. Python has a large standard library and that helps when writing tools.

C#
Microsoft can never leave anything alone so they made C# just to mess with the heads of C++ programmers. Like C++ and sometimes its not. Only used by me for coding things in Unity.

Assembly
Not much use for assembly languages these days beside to look cool. I can't even remember the last time I used it. Must have been DOS to access some registers and switch graphic mode. The glory of Mode 0x13, 256 colours is really all you need. Should upgrade ZeroFps to use SIMD instructions someday, see if I have to use it again then. I would like to be cool again.

Active Server Pages (ASP)
Language for web development that sometimes seems to be designed to confuse everyone. You take a normal web page and then write code all over it. Then when you open the web page the server runs the code and if all goes well you get a new dynamic web page back. I did my first website in asp before blogs where cool. Then I meet Dvoid and was afraid to tell him I used anything done by Microsoft so I switched web host and started to use PHP.

Java
Used it for a week in a training course and i did not like it. Not surprising really as I do not drink coffee.

Machine Code
Only did this one in a school project on some small mini computer. Just enough to learn that it is not fun.

Mel
Strange language that exist behind the scenes in the 3D software Maya. Made some exporters and tools in it.

PHP
When I moved on with my website to a new host I did my website in PHP for a while before moving on to a existing blog platform. Still have some custom parts on my website but web design is really not for me.

AmigaBASIC
First programming language used. I made a small text based adventure in it.

QBasic
Nibbles is still cool.

Objective - C
Apple also like to mess with people so they made Objective-C. I have only used it a little when working on OS X projects.

Visual Basic / Visual Basic .NET
Nice for making windows programs. Made some tools in it and then not much more.

QuakeC
Language used in the game Quake. I used it to tweak quake for fun and for profit. Well really to cheat at a LAN party. Secret buttons to give super weapons, ammo and each time we killed someone we lowered the score they had. I still lost the game :). They never found out until I told them after the LAN. Then they refused to let us host the game the next time :(.