What if the future of programming is already here, and we just don’t see it as such? https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/12/14/the-reason-epic-landed-a-15-billion-valuation-is-not-fortnite-success.html

"The Unreal Engine is to Epic Games what AWS is to Amazon." The quote I was looking for. Given how long the Unreal Engine has been around (1998), I'm ever so slightly surprised we haven't seen a Metaverse grow out of it, or anywhere else for that matter.

Unreal Engine feels like a successor to Flash, which seems like A Good Thing to me. The business model is different, better suited to the way these sorts of media creation tools tend to be used (lots of hobbyists and students who can’t afford to spend money and would pirate it if it was for sale, a handful of huge companies using it to power major properties who are willing and able to pay). But the premise of the tool — an integrated art and programming environment focused on interactivity and multimedia with easy cross platform distribution — fills an essential role that’s been a void for the past 8 years.

We should also consider that an appropriate programming environment is not only about what we build, but also about how we deal with an existing system once we have it. How debuggable is it? How evolvable is it? How explainable is it?

Unreal and Unity are the present of programming for me :)

@Scott Anderson When you say they “are the present” for you that’s exactly what I mean — maybe you’re already experiencing today what many of us are still looking for in other areas of our field. Have you ever looked at your tools from that perspective? What should today’s regular programming IDEs take as inspiration from Unreal and Unity? And what does still not feel like an improvement?

Or are you @Scott Anderson just saying that they are what you use professionally?

@Stefan @wtaysom I'm saying both, they are what I use professionally as a AR/VR application developer, but I think certain environments could learn from game engines. It's tricky because both of them are generally used in combination with regular programming IDEs (Visual Studio, XCode, Rider, etc.) and other tools that make programming in that environment easier (Resharper, Visual Assist), so I think comparing them to coding IDEs isn't quite right and the browser, or Flash comparison is more accurate, but still not quite right

3D gaming is such a difficult environment, that it is basically untenable without an engine underneath your work to make it feasible. There are many 3D engines. The company that made all the flight simulator series for EA had an engine specific to flight. And i am sure the driving games have engines as well. Unreal Engine is very sophisticated in its workflow; getting the same code and assets to work on such a huge range of hardware, where the number of polygons has to be adjusted to match the platform requirements is a huge part of it. But there is nothing easy to learn about the Unreal engine, it is a career decision to invest into learning such a complex tool.

@Edward de Jong / Beads Project I agree about the present reality. 3D tooling (both game environments and modeling tools) has great ideas on offer as well as horrors. As for APIs, my mechanical engineer friends and I often argue over who has it worse off.