Anyone else find Pawn rather frustrating lately?
 

I've been writing in Pawn since the very beginning of my scripter/programmer days, which was around 7 years ago. No matter the frustration, I love Pawn as much as I did back then. It helped me climb up to learn more powerful languages.

But, after getting into Object Oriented programming, for a few years, I cannot seem to understand and cope with Pawn's "childish" way of working like I used to, mainly around object types, mostly with the fact that its not an Object Oriented language. It's just gotten a lot frustrating and I'm considering migrating to C++. AKA dish out AMXX and work in the core. AKA Metamod.

I know that the point Pawn is to work in an easier environment for unexperienced developers, hence my backstory. :^), however, I really do consider moving to Metamod plugins. I've tried making a couple of silly little hello world and player death hooking plugins and the concept is pretty much the same, but hey, I can create classes, structures and explicitly name each variable corresponding to its type!

Pawn will always remain my #1 Mentor in programming.
What are your thoughts on Metamod plugins? Have you ever worked as hard in them as in AMXX?

Re: Anyone else find Pawn rather frustrating lately?
 

There's always a boundary between where the simplicity of abstraction becomes a frustration. Still, it serves its purpose to provide an easy entry point for people, and adding too many concepts may make it more difficult and may introduce overhead for what otherwise should've been a minimalistic language.

With the combination of SM and SP, it saves much of the hassle of hooking, unhooking, all the backend setup, etc. It allows you to get straight to the logic of your plugin. So in a way, you are trading for abstraction here.

Of course, if you want to go beyond the scope of the language/API, you would end up interop-ing outside of that ecosystem.

Re: Anyone else find Pawn rather frustrating lately?
 

Why is Pawn "childish"?
Pawn is a small, light-weight and C-like robust scripting language that runs on a virtual machine. It has even been ported to a device of only 32 kilobytes of RAM. It is created just to be fast enough and not use too much resources (hence why many games use it).

Why doesn't HL support a SM-like scripting platform (language)?
It doesn't need to. It is an old game created in 1998 (although started in 1997) not highly-populated anymore. Since AMXX's development in 2003, there have been a lot of modules and plugins created around it. Not even active people would bother switching and porting stuff for a new syntax.

Re: Anyone else find Pawn rather frustrating lately?
 

When you move to metamod plugin, you still need to re-make a couple of functions that AMXX already do it for you.
Also need to re-make a lot of checks fixes to your mod. And finally hook same shits of as AMXX (I mean, player spawns, events, messages, commands and other bullshit).

For me Pawn is not frustrating, is a way to make thinks more easily than reinvent the well, also PAWN or AMXX is not outdated on my point of view, since HL1 engine not changed so much in a couple of years! Why AMXX need to change to?

An langauge can frustrating anyone, is pure preference in some cases.

I really appreciate the amxx dev team work, since have a lot of good tools to make the things easy.
Look new menus for example, is a tool to make my life easy when creating user menus and manage it

Yes Pawn can be frustrating anyone with his design, but is a Pawn language problem not amxx that decide to use it.

Ps. It is my point of view :bee:

Re: Anyone else find Pawn rather frustrating lately?
 

If you find plain Pawn frustrating you can always move to SourcePawn.