Surprising lack of scripters!

I never really brought this to the forums because it didn't bother me so much, but now i believe i have reason enough to (it's late, i'm bored).
Considering this games unique selling point is the ability to be, do and create anything, a surprisingly small amount of people are actually doing this, and people seem to avoid scripting like the plague.
I've been thinking about this, and i simply can't draw any conclusions. Scripting is immensly easy to learn, taking the slowest of learners no more than a day or two to master the basics, and it really opens the door to a huge part of the secondlife experience. Since i learned to script (in my first week on secondlife) i havn't been able to go a day without scripting in some way at least once every ten minutes, and it's extremely useful in all aspects of SL. Scripting is, of course, the very think which makes everything in Second Life do what it does, and to me that seems to be the most important thing in this world. So i'd like an answer to this (quite clearly too, if you will) to the question "Why do so few people choose to script".
Your awesome friend, monkeydude.

What makes you think there is a lack of scripters? I know lots... maybe there are a lack of scripters, I've never noticed it, but I'm curious as to how you came to that conclusion.

One or two days to learn the basics, one or two years to master the finer points of how to work around LSL's atrocious limitations

because only 1 out of about 20 people i meet script.

How many people do you know IRL, and how many of those know how to program?

The biggest limitation is not learning it at all.

programming is not comparable to scripting, also, in secondlife you're immersed in a game that is built on this language, whilst real life isn't built on C++.
lsl is a kind of learn it in a week kiddy language that is used to have a lot of fun.

Look, I'm not your friend, monkeydude. In fact, I'm not even going to call you ****** again. I'ma call you Josh.

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail72.html

So, a lack of scripters, eh Josh? Actually, quite a few of us choose the dark side of scripting... we just don't happen to be as vocal as some residents. Many scripters (like myself) tend to hide at the outskirts of Second Life, either in a private sim or some niche of the world.

Given how vocal we can be in Scripting Tips, I'd say there are plenty of us. But if you really need a reason for the "surprising lack" anyway, I'd say the newer commercial culture has just diluted how many scripters there are.

Well, clearly you're trolling and as such I won't bother replying to you.

Easy? Heck, I can't even manage to understand the basics! And I haven't ever seen them laid out, either. Scripting is hugely Greek to me, and heaven knows its crippling not to understand it.

coco

Some people just don't want to script.. it doesn't interest them.

My wife, for example, has as much interest in scripting as my dog has in comic books.. which is to say, about the same amount of interest as I have in what she does: Making clothes.

Now she could turn to me and say that making clothes is so easy - taking just a little while to learn how to make a T-Shirt.. that it's the thing that seperates SL from other games she's played.. and lets face it.. EVERYONE at some point wears clothes.. so why doesn't everyone make them?

My good buddy Juro could say the same thing about building...

I could even say the same thing about computers and programming in RL.

But different people are interested in different aspects of SL.. and the ability to do it ALL is what makes Second Life so different. Each and every aspect of the tools we have at our disposal to make the world.

Siggy.

Δεν μπορείτε χειρόγραφο;

I learned LSL in five minutes, mastered it in ten, reinvented it in thirty minutes, got an idea for a better product an hour later, and sold that to a Department of Defense contractor the next day for ten tons of money.

Now I'm Tahiti with a drink in my hand and my laptop on the sand next to me, wondering what to do with myself. Oh, I know... there's everything else that SL has to offer.

Maybe I'm a dummy, but I've been fiddling with scripting for over a year and I still get confused. In fact I have to save my work line by line (when possible) to isolate errors. The interelation of the scripting componants don't seem instantly obvious to me- I usually have to draw a picture (or chart or graph) to determine what I want to do and translate that into LSL. Or do the inverse to understand how someone else's script works.

The only reason I've learned anything is that I really, really, really wanted to make my builds do stuff, even if it meant lots of trial and error. I can easlily see how someone more interested in other persuits wouldn't be motivated to take the time and effort to learn LSL if they found it as confusing as I did

The linux client will attract more, I promise.

I pretty much agree with what people have said here so much. Plus.. the current Geek population ration in SL is something like so:

Geeks < Mainstream

Nuff said.

Most scripters tend to be in hiding and working on their scripts. For every 1 out of 20 you meet, there's probably a dozen you'll never know existed because they're in hiding


- Newfie

The script editor's indentation system is extremely annoying to me.

The font in the scripting editor is too small, the curly braces look much like the pipe symbol even with my reading glasses on, commas and periods are barely visible and essentially indistinguishable.

Lack of a case statement or an "if else elseif endif" sort of structure makes programming look terrible.

LSL starts with an ugly but powerful language as it's base, then strips off the power and leaves the ugliness.

Delay while saving, failure to save, saving the text of the script and giving every sign that it should be running the new version of the code but actually still running an old version of the code, sometimes running a version of the code that existed an hour ago after running revised code.

Not having a dockable editing pane that can stay up and let the world be displayed in the part of the screen remaining instead of having the world partially blocked by the editor window.

Not being able to copy and paste the popup help.

Not having the LSL wiki incorporated into the help system.

Having to send messages to objects instead of being able to call their methods directly.

Lack of block commenting.

Not able to use includes or define libraries.

Very aggravating naming conventions, using some ALL_CAPS_WITH_UNDERSCOREs, llSomeThingDoneThisWay, llSometimesUsing2ToMeanToInsteadOfTo, and...

Using "ll" in front of everything instead of just llTaking llThe llCommonNames llFor llThe llLanguage's llUse llAnd llLetting llThose llWho llDefine llFunctions llThat llCouldUse llSimilarNames llDeal llWith llIt llWhen llThey llNeed ll2 llInstead llOf llMaking llUs llSee llThe llLetters llLL llSo llFreaking llMany llTimes llIt llMakes llYou llWanna llPuke.

case ... good
includes.... good

arrays & structs better better better

Yup yup yup yup yup.....

Hmmm, Suezanne. Kinda makes me glad I haven't been able to learn it. Just wish I could do something as simple as get a sit script into a torus-based object, or even just a regular chair with the sitting on part at a 90-degree angle. As far as I can determine, there is nothing written anywhere with these basics from the ground up.

coco

Μπορώ!

16K for code, data, and stack. OK, so you compile your program and it says 6,000 or so bytes free. Then you get a big string, and you pass it between a few func- Crap, stack heap collision. Let's see why - ah yes, this 1.5KB string was sent to a few different functions. Only we can't pass by reference, we have to pass by value only - meaning that string was duplicated a bunch of times! And between that and calling a bunch of functions (uses stack space) I ran out of memory! Hooray!!! Well gosh, maybe I can use a global variable instead... but then I limit reusability on my functions, since they will only work with one global string, meaning if I bring in another string I want to process, I end up having to make a copy of the original string anyway... It is not good for granularity or reusability.

Also, LSL lacks multidimensional array support. This has always irked me. Even BASIC can handle multidimensional arrays. And - this is very hard to forgive - LL has, in the past, made arguably pointless changes to LSL that A) broke existing code, making extra needless work for in-world developers (or just irreversibly damaging old stuff made by people who don't log in anymore) and B) provided pretty much zero tangible benefit. Things like changing llParseString2List(), no longer raising state_entry() when a state branches to itself (and really - what other reason is there for a state to branch to itself, other than raising that event?), and killing llListen()s between states (which royally screwed Tcoz during last year's game dev contest.) Possibly other stuff I haven't heard about. Imagine if Microsoft or GNU or Larry Wall or ZEND decided to change how strtok() worked. Just for shits and giggles, you know, hey, we realize you'll have to comb over potentially thousands of lines of old code, but hey, we feel like it, so we'll do it. Hehe sorry! ^_____^ With LSL it's so much worse, because you don't have the option to use an older compiler and get the old behavior. To its credit, LL has stopped doing this, but it really left a bad taste in my mouth. On the llParseString2List() thing, it made several hours of extra work for me. That's time I needed to spend on other things.

LSL is basically a hacked-together pile of spaghetti, which is exactly what you can expect of any first iteration of a programming language. It will get better when we move to Mono and can ditch it in favor of languages that are more mature (and well-mannered.) I would like to see an enhanced version of LSL, and who knows, maybe that will be done in the future.

The standard C hack of doing elseif works fine for me

if ( expr ) {
    //do something
} else if ( expr1 ) {
    //do something1
} else if ( expr2 ) {
   // do something 2
} else {
   //default stuff
}

Maybe that's ugly, but I'm used to this convention after so many years of use.

Καλό αγόρϊ

καλό γατάκι * πετά catnip τον τρόπο της Jill *