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 hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“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)