[Tinymux] Talking to external code.

[T. Alexander Popiel]

In message:  <6.2.1.2.2.20051205182837.05e709f0 at mail.prodigal.ca>
             Ben Trafford <ben at prodigal.ca> writes:

>         4) If enough people use it, common libraries of code (much like 
>SGP, except better) could be distributed in a language that is far more 
>familiar to many more people than softcode or C++.

According to a couple sources I found[*], Java, C, and C++ appear
to be more popular than PHP.  How do you defend your familiarity
argument?

[*] http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
    http://csharpcomputing.com/Reviews/languagesByJobNumbers.htm
    http://weblogs.asp.net/israelio/archive/2004/08/05/209219.aspx
    http://www.dedasys.com/articles/language_popularity.html

>         In terms of the whole "the goal shouldn't be to increase the 
>number of games,"

That's a misrepresentation of what I said; I suggested that the
goal shouldn't be to increase the number of MUXes.  More games is
certainly a laudable thing, but I suspect there are better tools
with less historical baggage.  Neverwinter Nights comes to mind
as one possibility that a lot of people doing tabletop conversions
have enjoyed.

>let me backtrack on something I said earlier.  My feeling 
>could be more correctly described as, "People with good storytelling skills 
>shouldn't have such a difficult time finding a coder for their game. PHP 
>integration would go a long way towards solving this, in my opinion."

If you think that the choice of programming language will
significantly influence a person's interest level in a game,
then I suspect you're looking at people who are more interested
in the language than in the game.  Those sorts of people are
(in my experience) not going to stick with the game long enough
to finish any job they start... either because their interest
in the game was already grudging enough to be swayed by nuisances
in implementation, or they will have learned what they wanted to
about the language, and they'll move on.  In either case, you're
better served finding different people, even if it is hard to
find them.

- Alex