*raises hand* I do.

I tired to learn C#, but I couldn't even do the tutorial right. :(

I'm not even good at GML…

luckily i learned php before gamemaker, otherwise moving onto languages later would've given me such hell.

i understand that gamemaker tries to be leaniant(how the piss do you spell that word) with its language, but not forcing users to use ";", not restricting variables to a single type, and not forcing setting variables before you use them, will only set them up for frustration in the future.

seems like everyone posting is a big fan of C# and C++, i'd like to advocate for java. mainly due to the cross compatibility, and that we should be trying to get gaming available on all systems.

Like what? Syntax-related? if so it's not GM's fault, since you can use a normal C++ style syntax fine. I always use semi-colons and only use single = for assignment in GM.

I hope you haven't been coding like:

if var=1

doshit()

Unless you're going to use e.g. Python. Because, you know, not every language requires semicolons and variable setting. In any case, those are very easy to learn once you start using a different programming language. My only bad habit from GM of this sort was using = instead of == in if statements, which took some time to root out.

However, my main problem with GM and coding practices is that it somehow made me use the same piece of code for different objects instead of thinking in terms of scripts. To this day, I never actually return variables in GM, but that's also because GM sucks at returning more than one output (and GM lists are a joke).

@rob, well the fact that you're able to use

var = "topato";

if (var == 3){do_this();}

or

if var = 3 {dothis()}

doesn't really promote consistency, i think that's what i should have said.