Comment by gethly
7 hours ago
> Odin is explicitly made for video games.
Ginger Bill vehemently refuses this notion and tries to fight in every podcast, to "sell" Odin as general purpose low level language. But he is failing because of my points and your claim just proves it yet again that Odin has profiled itself as language for games when in reality that was never the intention of Bill. There is nothing wrong with that, it's just the perception among programmers.
It's also in the Handmade crowd, and for a lot of people that's intimately connected to video games. I actually think Handmade's approach is helpful for games in a way it isn't for a lot of other software.
Games are art. The key thing is that you have to actually make it. Handmade encourages people who might make some art to actually make something rather than being daunted by the skill needed for a very sophisticated technology. Handmade is like telling a would-be photographer "You already have a camera on your phone. Point it at things and take pictures of them" rather than "Choose your subject, then you will need to purchase either an SLR or maybe a larger camera, and suitable lenses and a subscription for Photoshop and then take a college course in photo composition"
I don't want to use a text editor made by someone who has no idea what they're doing and learned about rope types last week. A dozen handmade text editors, most not as good as pico, are of no value to anybody.
But I do want to play video games by people who have no idea what they're doing. That's what Blue Prince is, for example. A dozen handmade video games means a dozen chances for an entirely unprecedented new game. It'll be rough around the edges, but novelty is worth a lot.