11Nov Rise of the languages

This month has been a very interesting/exciting for programmers of all backgrounds and may be the cornerstone of an industry wide conceptual change.

Unity3D, a primarily web based 3D accelerated language, has announced their “indie” version of their engine as a free no-strings-attached package. This was a wise choice for the company as Google’s free O3D alternative has been gaining support and Adobe’s Flash is rumored to get 3D acceleration soon.

In just a week later, Epic Games released the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), a desktop commercial gaming engine, free of change for non-profit usage. UDK, however, does not compete with Unity3D. UDK has an incredible desktop graphics engine that Unity3D would not be able to compare to. However, Unity3D can run over the browser, has a super small file size for compiled games, and is much easier to learn than UDK. It is also worth mentioning that Unity3D is not a direct competitor to Flash either as its tools for 2D development are poor at best and Flash is installed on almost 97% of all computers (while Unity3D is around 6% I think). There has been little news on the haXe side of things in the past month which is a little disappointing considering the potential of the language.

Finally, Google unveiled Go programming language which is tailored towards system and server development and takes advantage of concepts like multi-threading and server clustering of tasks. While this is not terribly exciting for some, this language may reduce much of the massive complexity employed for enterprise systems and servers today.

One of the underlying themes we are seeing here today is that the user community around a platform is king. A developed language may be perfect and boast all kinds of features, but without users, it inevitably fails. As a developer, this is a fantastic change in the industry as it means cheaper or free entry into powerful languages and more help and support being offered to the community from the creators.

Author: Jonathan Dunlap Jonathan is an experienced software engineer, sole blogger of JADBOX, author of FlashMVC, humanitarian, and has contracted work for Microsoft, Coke, and Disney.