I tend to agree in part with Mr Skunk. I am also quite a visual-focussed person and while I don't entirely mind the current IDE and it does a reasonable job of providing a simple environent to program in, it is little more than a basic editor and doesn't really have any features that take the effort and struggle out of programming. For someone who is visually artistic I think you like to focus less on the technical functional style of programming and prefer that programming be an art form where everything is graceful, complimentary, harmoneous, etc. I think it would help me as an artistic person to have an IDE which not only produced a more comfortable and appealing visual style but also was more in-tune with the kind of creative flow that I like to work in. I think that more artistic type people tend to be more sensitive to and affected by subtle things like a visual appearance because they have more brain-wiring inclined to see things in an orderly, beautiful and harmonized way. That means your IDE's gotta be pretty, it's gotta flow well, it's gotta provide tools to simplify having to get technical, etc, so that you can remain being artistic in a more abstract world rather than having to get into the (to be honest) frustrating experience of trying to get a technical programming language to do what you envision.
I think there are other types of people who are not so artistic in this way and think of themselves as more of a programmer than an artist even if they are able to intellectually come up with clever solutions and sophisticated designs. I think they come up with these from mental processes and thinking more than from some kind of `vision` as is the case with more artistic people. And you see these programmer types creating games with crappy graphics because they just don't have the flair for the graphical side, and similarly maybe the more artistic types don't have the flair for the in's and out's of programming. Different people experience the world differently and the more closely mapped a creative technique is to our natural way of working, the better we get along with it.
I don't know that Blitz Max is worse in any respect than previous Blitzes. I used BlitzBasic 2 on the Amiga and it does seem that with the addition of OO techniques and some other changes, there is a learning curve with BlitzMax, but it's not too hard. Having said that, in general I am frustrated with programming languages because they are usually too close to how computers work and not close enough to how human's work. Even a language based on Basic still requires the creative person to `come down to the level` of having to interpret and translate their vision into something that can be expressed in the language, which is too often a very convoluted and frustrating task. So I think such people could indeed be helped out by a more abstract interface, even higher-level than Basic. The suggestion of creating stuff in Flash is interesting, although we all know that Flash graphics is not very quick and for me at least, I still like to have all the flexibility and processing power that software development gives you, as opposed to the much fewer options and capabilities of web-based software.
Anyway, that's my rant. I agree with you Skunk, but at the same time BlitzMax is okay. I am probably more 50/50 programmer-artist.
I think there are other types of people who are not so artistic in this way and think of themselves as more of a programmer than an artist even if they are able to intellectually come up with clever solutions and sophisticated designs. I think they come up with these from mental processes and thinking more than from some kind of `vision` as is the case with more artistic people. And you see these programmer types creating games with crappy graphics because they just don't have the flair for the graphical side, and similarly maybe the more artistic types don't have the flair for the in's and out's of programming. Different people experience the world differently and the more closely mapped a creative technique is to our natural way of working, the better we get along with it.
I don't know that Blitz Max is worse in any respect than previous Blitzes. I used BlitzBasic 2 on the Amiga and it does seem that with the addition of OO techniques and some other changes, there is a learning curve with BlitzMax, but it's not too hard. Having said that, in general I am frustrated with programming languages because they are usually too close to how computers work and not close enough to how human's work. Even a language based on Basic still requires the creative person to `come down to the level` of having to interpret and translate their vision into something that can be expressed in the language, which is too often a very convoluted and frustrating task. So I think such people could indeed be helped out by a more abstract interface, even higher-level than Basic. The suggestion of creating stuff in Flash is interesting, although we all know that Flash graphics is not very quick and for me at least, I still like to have all the flexibility and processing power that software development gives you, as opposed to the much fewer options and capabilities of web-based software.
Anyway, that's my rant. I agree with you Skunk, but at the same time BlitzMax is okay. I am probably more 50/50 programmer-artist.