Narrow Horizons

May the Lords of K0bol save us from narrow-minded Stallman acoplytes*:

"Well - sad...since you use this properietary M$ crap, i can't test this variant. Also i think that it could be quite interesting from the gameplay.

IMO you shouldn't use programming languages like visual C (or other one-manufacturer-one-system languages) for *Bands because its against the philosophy. They should run without trouble on most common computer systems and not only on windows."

So..what have we got here:

• Obligatory reference to "M$". Check.
  
• Obligatory insistance that only the one true language (probably C?) be used Check.
• Miltonesque mindset of the true believer on display - that "philsophy" comes first before everything else. Check.
• Lazy assumption that windows software can't be ported to other operating systems. Check.
  

Dude, chillax, as I believe the youth of today say.

But to answer the respondant's specific points (without bursting a blood valve):

Visual Studio is pretty much the best development environment out there at the moment. Mono allows cross-platform .NET development. Microsoft (the whole M$ thing is just immaturity), for all the bad things they've done, have also done plenty of good things as well; and programming, when you take a reasonable view of things, isn't important enough to be something worth an ideological crusade over. Women's Reproductive Rights, Identity Cards, Access to Clean Drinking Water, Trade Tariffs and Barriers - those are worth getting worked up about. But not whither someone uses one bleeding format of input text or another to produce a load of sodding pixels on a screen.

Bet he's a Vi user as well. That would explain a lot**.

Feh, and more feh! His attitude makes me want to code a C# roguelike just because. Kharne# anyone?

* This post was brought to you by the concepts "maturity" and "perspective". Dude, try it some time. It works, y'know.
** Emacs, definitely, in case you ever wanted ot know. Although Textpad is better than both of them.

The Revenge of C.

With all this talk on r.g.r.d. of picking up abandoned projects written in C or C++, I have an increasing urge to write a small Roguelike in said languages. Realistically though, with Kharne and with Prelude, I have enough on my plate for the time being and my copy of K & R can wait*.

I've had lots of experience with C or C++, in fact around the turn of the millenium I spent four years after graduating using both languages to a reasonably high degree of competence and complexity in a commercial environment (the company I worked for, a major international telecomms company is now bankrupt, which is not surprising given that for most of its existance, it was utter and complete cluelessness made flesh). One thing I do regret from my time there is that I never really learned to use the STL, instead we were locked into using the Roguewave libraries). I also spent a lot of time with Informix, for my sins.

However, if I do decide to get in some C or C++ coding I think I may focus my efforts away from roguelikes and do something completely different.

(* Incidentally, I dislike K & R style indenting. The Kharne source code is written using Allman indenting, which is the defacto standard in the Pascal world)

C# and climbing aboard the Microsoft Juggernaut

I really need to learn C#. Its a shame in a way Kharne is being written in Delphi. I'm not keen on the baggage surrounding C# (i.e. the .NET framework) but if I was starting again, I'd do a roguelike in C#.

I might however write a Vault/Data Creator/Editor and other support utilities in C#. Kharne itself will stay Delphi for now.

Programming Wars (not)

Sometimes miracles do happen. A recent thread on r.g.r.d. asked for advice on programming languages to use for developing roguelikes. And the corresponding thread didn't descend into a language war. Is the roguelike community finally growing up?