quote:
Originally posted by CookieRevised
... bigger, slower, more prone to errors, very hard to debug, beginning scripters don't even know what they actually are doing (and thus asking more questions as to why something doesn't work), etc....
That's what you could say about any abstraction layer: jQuery, .NET,...
The extra file weight shouldn't be so much of a problem for modern computers and Internet connections, nor should the difference in performance be very noticeable if the library creator knows what he's doing.
I agree that the use of a framework can make debugging tougher, it adds an extra abstraction layer between developer and machine so the chance that you're doing something wrong may increase. However I think the chance of doing something wrong is bigger when the developer has to write a whole function by himself then when he calls a library function which is already thoroughly tested.
You're probably right that beginning developers will tend to jump straight onto a library without learning the underlying language. I didn't learn C++ before C# either so I'm also in that same boat, but I started with JavaScript so I already knew about the basics of programming. I've seen people jump straight into jQuery who don't know anything about the basic structures of JavaScript. This also applies to Plus! scripting on top of JScript: newcomers try to do two things when a message is send, so they define two OnEvent_ChatWndSendMessage functions... Perhaps a library could help here.
I understand your worries about using frameworks. Perhaps a better solution would be that the Plus! scripting environment itself gets updated to comply with our needs
(I really want better event handling!), so we don't need libraries to give us what the scripting environment can't do. And if that doesn't happen, I could just make a small private framework for my own scripts without releasing it separately. If there's something wrong with the library, then I can still just update my own scripts and don't need to worry about other developers using my library.
Note to self: write shorter posts!
/ 
