Jonathan Blow on scripting languages
Jeru Sanders1 HN recommender · recommended in 2 months, 2020–2022
commentary · intermediate · evergreen · 2020–2022 on HN
A 10-minute clip from a Jonathan Blow Twitch stream in which he argues that game engines do not really need separate scripting languages. He questions the value of embedded interpreters when the main language can do the job.
Cited in threads about Lua, embedded scripting, and game engines as a concise argument that scripting languages are redundant.
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4 comments from Hacker News
There’s nothing about this that screams “this language needs to be created”. Call me a pessimist, but I’ve seen So many toy languages on HN. My advice is, if you don’t have any original ideas and want users, your best bet is to implement a subset of JS, that’s the route I’m taking. Jonathan Blow has a great talk on the redundancy of scripting languages in game engines. ▶ this video
Lua doesn’t really solve anything fundamental. It’s popular because it’s small and easy to embed. But embeddable interpreters, while fun pet projects, they’re redundant and trivial. Jonathan Blow has a great explanation of this ▶ this video Write reusable libraries first, let people embed them into whatever scripting language/GUI app they want. Scripting languages, Linux distros, it’s all Pokémon cards.
"Gaming engines are scriptable for a reason" - I'm sure I've heard the opposite opinion from respectable sources at least 2 times. Here's Jonathan Blow ▶ this video I agree with the rest wholeheartedly.
> I can guarantee you that a game will need a scripting language. Better get that done already. Is that really so certain? ▶ this video