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Python in game development?

Kragen Sitaker kragen at dnaco.net
Tue Aug 29 20:42:48 EDT 2000 
In article <T1Ze5.9877$r4.5093 at news.indigo.ie>,
Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie> wrote:
>In article <8lh588$oti$3 at news.fsu.edu>, Ronald Steedman
><steedman at quake.cs.fsu.edu> wrote:
>> Imagine how an intepreter would help. Try one thing IMMEDIATELY SEE THE
>> RESULT... try another thing IMMEDIATELY SEE THE RESULT... then you only
>> compile the application when you're finished and want a faster program.
>
>If I were your boss I would make sure you had no access to an 
>interpreter!  I would even slow down your compilation by giving you an 
>older machine ;-)
>
>Changing things at random and hoping the problem goes away is not the 
>way to fix bugs.

In general, I agree with you.  But there are exceptions.

There are times when you don't know what your program should be doing
--- for example, what size to make a window border for a pleasant
visual effect, or which options to put on the main menu and which to
relegate to a submenu.

At these times, instant turnaround is a very useful thing to have.
These times seem to occur rather frequently in my development
experience.

There's also the argument that, if I make ten changes and then rerun my
test suite, a failure can be caused by any of the ten changes; while if
I rerun the test suite after each change, the failure can only be
caused by the change I just made.

And there are times when the libraries or platform simply are not doing
what the documentation claims they will do; I run into this constantly
when programming in JavaScript.  Instant feedback makes characterizing
their behavior much more pleasant.

There's the final argument that correcting errors in your understanding
of your program as soon as possible is a very useful thing.  When I'm
programming in environments with a single-stepping debugger, I usually
single-step through every line of my code the first time I run it to
make sure it's doing what I think it's doing.  Read-eval-print loops
are also helpful for this kind of thing.
-- 
<kragen at pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves
possess.
                -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]
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