Comments on: Write A Script For It Yes! I maintain that regular expressions were probably the single most useful thing I might have ever learned how to use. I'm a Perl guy myself for most of my quick and dirty scripting needs - which are many and often. We deal with a lot of massive data sets and without scripting, I can't imagine the mind-numbing torture we'd be subjected to. If I find myself doing anything a few times in a row - I usually immediately stop, and write a script to do it. Great article! Yes! I maintain that regular expressions were probably the single most useful thing I might have ever learned how to use. I’m a Perl guy myself for most of my quick and dirty scripting needs – which are many and often. We deal with a lot of massive data sets and without scripting, I can’t imagine the mind-numbing torture we’d be subjected to.

If I find myself doing anything a few times in a row – I usually immediately stop, and write a script to do it.

Great article!

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By: Fabrice Lété/2011/05/11/write-a-script-for-it/#comment-3947 Fabrice Lété Thu, 12 May 2011 19:26:04 +0000 Python/Ruby script have another advantage over batch script : they are portable to other operating system. If you have a large collection of batch script and you need to port game to Mac, you'll need to convert them to Python/Ruby nonetheless (you could convert them to shell script, but then they wouldn't work on Windows, and you'll have to maintain two version of the scripts). Python/Ruby script have another advantage over batch script : they are portable to other operating system. If you have a large collection of batch script and you need to port game to Mac, you’ll need to convert them to Python/Ruby nonetheless (you could convert them to shell script, but then they wouldn’t work on Windows, and you’ll have to maintain two version of the scripts).

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By: Johan Wendin/2011/05/11/write-a-script-for-it/#comment-3918 Johan Wendin Thu, 12 May 2011 08:43:15 +0000 Hi there, My feedback may be poor because I didn't take the time to try it myself; but last week I discovered Babushka: http://babushka.me <blockquote>Once you describe a job using its DSL, babushka knows not only how to accomplish each part of the job, but also how to check if each part is already satisfied. For each component of the job, a test, along with the code to make that test pass—test-driven sysadmin</blockquote> Might worth a try, I'm sorry I can't tell you more about it. Hi there,

My feedback may be poor because I didn’t take the time to try it myself; but last week I discovered Babushka: I agree with Jare. I find simple things just as easy to do in Ruby/Python as in a batch file and complex things much easier. Scripts that start out simple have a tendency to grow more complex over time. I agree with Jare. I find simple things just as easy to do in Ruby/Python as in a batch file and complex things much easier. Scripts that start out simple have a tendency to grow more complex over time.

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By: Jare/2011/05/11/write-a-script-for-it/#comment-3903 Jare Wed, 11 May 2011 23:58:34 +0000 I particularly agree with the point about how it formalises procedural knowledge. Consider Fabrice’s recent article about resurrecting old projects – lots of the procedural knowledge about how to build the game, or how to create particular assets, or how to get the development environment set up, etc, all gets lost over time. If you want to avoid that then you need to write the procedure down, and if you’re going to write it down, why not do it in a way that also makes your life easier in the future?

One important flip side to this is scriptability – when you build custom tools and tech, make sure you do so in a way that permits the user to script it. It’s one of the things I’ve spent a fair amount of time writing in Unity – for example, a script to make sure that the folders in a particular location match the entries in an enum in the code, to create missing folders and report on extraneous ones.

]]> By: TomP/2011/05/11/write-a-script-for-it/#comment-3897 TomP Wed, 11 May 2011 21:10:08 +0000