Games that teach real programming languages or teach real methodologies

[Declan Drake]

Are there any games out there that teach real programming languages or teach real methodologies. I see lots of pseudo languages. If none exist, which would be considered the closest to what I mention in the title? Thank you all.

[J4MESOX4D]

The Zachtronics range of games are worth a look https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/zachtronics

TIS100, Shenzen I/O, Exapunks and Spacechem are all little fun but complex titles with accompanying manuals.

[Declan Drake]

Thanks for your time in replying: I don't believe any of their titles teach you real programming languages though?

[Cathulhu]

It's more important to understand programming logic, which is rather universal.

[iceman1980]

Originally posted by fauxtronic:

You're not going to learn a programming language by playing games. Zachtronics games are a good choice if you're learning programming however because they convey all kinds of important logic concepts, but be warned, they do not hold your hand.

TIS100 is an assembly language programming game, but it uses an ASM interpreter that's loosely based on the real thing. It also gets hard quick. The difficulty spike results in you staring at the screen and doing little else for long periods while you figure out complex problems, so it's anything but a fast moving game. There's a review on my profile page if you want to read more about it.

If you have no programming experience and wish to learn a programming language then just try an easy OOP language like C# and use the many excellent tutorials on the web. SAMS 'Learn x in 21 days' books used to provide a good foundation, but I have no idea if that's still the case. Once you've got C# down, you can use it as a stepping stone to more complex OOP languages.

Edit: Grammar. :/

Not sure I'd recommend C# to a beginner. Some of the more obscure OOP concepts are definitely not beginner friendly. Namely Interfaces (purely just a method definition with parameters as an implementation contract which requires the methods defined in an interface to be implemented by their inheriting classes. ) and Abstract Classes (can have concrete or abstract methods / members)

There is one language game I know about called Screeps yes it's on steam.

[iceman1980]

Originally posted by fauxtronic:

Beginners don't need to learn more obscure OOP concepts until they are no longer beginners. C# is a very easy language. Certainly easier than Object Pascal (Borland Delphi) which was the first low-level PC language I learned.

The language is also statically typed meaning you can't do a lot of things you can do in say either Ruby or Python. Heterogeneous data structures must be implemented using Structs. Python being dynamically or ruby being dynamically typed is an advantage however most of python is GIL'd (True multithreading is not supported). unless you run a something other than C based Python such as IronPython, Jython or the absolutely speedy fast Cython C bastarization.

You are Global Interpreter locked.

Ruby / Python is better option for beginners.

Array = ["string",1,1.0,"10293"] will not even work in C# without the use of a struct. Order I'd recommend. However this is not an explicit list you can by all means jump into the deep end if you want. I sort of started out in Python then switched to Java you can write multithreaded applications in java Python you cannot.

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[pasa]

Assy is as real as you can get. If you can deal with TIS-100 and similar games you're golden programming-wise (esp. finding the optimal solutions in all categories.

Even the no-language games are better excercise than most courses. Spacechem, Opus magnum, and similar games.

As for "methodology", that you will learn in work, or you have to go to some non-programming school like real engineering.

[Declan Drake]

There is one language game I know about called Screeps yes it's on steam.

Screeps is still alpha, but I will keep an eye on it.

Everyone else. Thank you for taking the time to reply. With all due respect, I didn't ask you all for advice - I asked you all for games that using a real programming language. Screeps is the only one from all the answers given here.