Criticism
Common criticism towards Game Maker is its odd typing system, where variables can only be strings or real numbers, yet also be indexed like arrays. There is no way to make a variable hold an array, the name of the array implicitly accesses the zeroth element. As such, there is no way to pass an array as a script argument, except by passing a string holding the name of the array, which is then used to access the array itself. The other data structures are not very well integrated into the language, requiring a type unsafe index handle to the data structure, and requiring explicit deallocation (which has the potential for memory leaks). Additionally, they are only available to registered users.
Although not directly a part of the language, another common source of criticism is Game Maker's creation of .exe files that consist of a runner and the textual GML source, waiting until the end user runs the game to parse into an Abstract Syntax Tree. This facilitates decompiling, and causes much slower start up times than necessary.
Read more about this topic: Game Maker Language
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)