RUBBISH!
this is my first reaction.
the max script is not a language today. it’s more like a way to talk with the system.
it can’t be really improved, extended…
but any developer who ignores the mxs just cuts own balls
there is no alternative today to the mxs.
i would be happy when the mxs will be replaced by Python. but not like pymel in maya…
i would like to see it like openmaya or openmaya.api
but it will never happen in the near future.
so…
don’t be an idiot by ignoring the learning of the mxs
mxs can not be extended as a language. it doesn’t mean it can’t be extended by new classes, methods, interfaces… but it’s more like a system extensions.
Interesting from where this idea come?
Denis have you run out of people to argue with that you have taken on yourself?
As with most extreme opinions, they to not really reflect reality.
I find the line from Denis most funny, considering it’s targeted at Chris Johnson
don’t bury anything before you don’t really know what it is
Maxscript as a language is indeed dead. It’s out of a different century and there is no evolvement happening anywhere ( meaning further language features development )
That does not mean that maxscript is dead for usage. It’s really great for small to mid projects. I would love to see it’s source being packed with the Max SDK . Alone the possibility to extend/enhance it’s UI layer would be great…
Maxscript is not dead because of two things. It is one of the best way to learn the structure of 3dmsax. And it leads the user to make things as automated as possible so it’s not dead at all, especially because it lets you do things very fast, it’s not sensitive for wrong codes, you don’t have to debug it so much and the whole structure is designed for these purposes.
Anyway if a user like me learn this language, learns the basics of programming and than c++ programming is just a few step further. Or any other language. (It is the same thing that python MEL offers for maya users)
Oh and look at the community because of mxs. There are much more tools in max than in any other 3d softwares, and all because of mxs. And it’s still expanding. Maxscript based modifiers in max 2016. I think it is a pretty good thing now it has relleased with mcg…
I would dispute that start learning programming with a language that is not strongly typed is primary a good thing. Another thing is that MXS’s does’nt enforce an object oriented approach. Even worse, one has to use some strange workarrounds to implement some of the most basic oo concepts. Others or completely missing and unsupported… This is my programmer half’s POV of course…
But as an applied language, MXS is of course not dead, community is alive and kicking and i don’t see that changing over the next few years…
I think learning something is never useless even if you have to learn other approaches as well. I think success is more important in this case in a psychological way. You gain it and with it you gain more pleasure to continue. Everything has to be started in little.
MAXscript is perfectly usable for simple stuff. Considering how deeply rooted it is in max, it is likely to stay for as long as 3ds max does. Even if the SDK documentation was made 10 times better, developing simple not performance-critical tools in C++ would still be an overkill…
Python isn’t exactly a fast language either. If the only thing that mattered was computational efficiency, the only languages around would likely be C + Assembly.
As far as starting learning with static vs. dynamic language:
Imho, it probably doesn’t matter much; eventually one would have to learn both modes of thinking and adjust habits anyway. Sticking to C/C++ habits of coding in Python/MAXscript would likely result in some pretty slow and ugly code, and the opposite would just not work.
Could you mention some of the bad habits that later proved counterproductive?
(It would likely be useful info for people who are starting with MAXscript to have in mind. I’m under the impression that many artists start learning programming specifically with MAXscript; the getting-started and how-to documentation in MAXscript help is pretty decent for someone new. Also, the only reasons for weird syntax decisions like 1-based indexes and passing function arguments seem to be there just to make the language look less intimidating…)
I learned programming with a (now dead) statically typed language Pascal/Delphi, before dropping programming and only picking it up again many years later with MAXscript. It took time to figure out that a manual while loop is not exactly the most efficient way to do things in MAXscript… I’m very much interested to hear how the opposite experience of dynamic-to-static for you was like.
The most dominant was that I would micro-optimize everything to the point of absurdity. I kept doing silly things in c# like hoisting string literals out of loops, because in Maxscript this would save memory and time. This resulted in ugly code which was not really any faster.
Of course, I can not say that learning it in this order is better than the opposite, and neither can anyone else, because we all learned it one way or the other and can not un-learn it in order to experience the inverse.
We shall find the code for that (no matter in what language)!
No, it’s obviously not ‘dead’. I agree to the point, it’s dead in development terms but not usage.
Currently there’s no better way to make scripts and tools quickly in Max, which pains me, and that’s because of the failings of the development team to implement anything properly.
So, is it dead? No. Should it be dead… that’s probably the more salient question.