Recent versions of Unity are actually using Roslyn ¹) but they are admittedly running a bit behind on C# language version. The currently supported version is at 9 while 14 came out last month. It's not really a huge issue in practice, though.
With Godot 4, the big difference between Godot and Godot .NET is that the version with NET support does not build to web and mobile support is 'experimental' ²). Also, they are two completely separate downloads and editor binaries, which makes switching languages decidedly non-trivial.
For a 2D game, if you can live without building to web, I'd pick Godot. Otherwise, I'd pick Unity.
This may be a dumb question, but I couldn't figure it out from the website: Does this app allow me to actually view my photos? Can I double-click a filename? Can I get a page of thumbnails? Some sort of a gallery view?
It's not too brutal. The main stipulation is that the free version is for non-commercial use. You gotta buy the packs for around $10 a pop, and you get get a pretty lax license. Unless you're trying to use Gen AI or NFTs.
You may want to list clearly somewhere which types of digital asset you support, because different industries have different ideas about that.
This only handles images, correct? And not video, audio, Office documents, PDFs, 3D models and animations, CAD/CAM drawings, PCB layouts, web pages, or code?
The Dutch language quote as displayed: "We mogen niet uit nonchalance fouten in een programma aanbrengen. Dat moeten we systematisch en met zorg doen.".
Feel free to run that through your favorite translator.
The subtitles: "We should not introduce errors through sloppiness but systematically keep them out."
The translator missed a very dry and very Dijkstra joke.
As a Norwegian, I always found Dutch interesting. It is just close enough, that I can read it and get the gist of the message, without actually knowing Dutch. It is much easier than, say, German.
I read the message as: "We must not carelessly introduce errors to a program, but rather systematically and with care"
The joke being that we introduce the errors systematically and with care.
There is something about Norwegian that makes it more easy to understand than any other Germanic language (besides English I guess, but that's just because we're broiled in it from early age). It somehow stayed more close to the shared Germanic than German itself?
Also: most Norwegians have very little accent when speaking English, unless they're in some kind of satiric Viking series.
Was watching Bron/The Bridge some time ago. Danish sounds like gibberish indeed, but then again "We hebben een serieus probleem" was a meme a little while back.
Dutch and Danish share heritage via Frysian and Saxon (English) heritage. IIRC the Frysian lived among the whole coast of North Sea from Holland till North-West Germany, and then enclaves in Denmark, too.
Dutch is a Franconian dialect though? They just didn’t go through the consonant shift like their cousins in the Rhineland. It isn’t really that closely related to Frisian or Low German and even less so to Norther Germanic.
It's called being mutually intelligible, which is when languages share enough words/sentence structure that you can understand the meaning of a sentence even if you can't directly translate it.
How much German do you know? As a Norwegian Dutch is completely Greek to me. I did take German in school although none of it stuck besides some pointless(in isolation) grammar rules.
Also Norwegian, and I'm with the person above, but I think it depends a lot on your Norwegian dialect, maybe? The more towards conservative bokmål you get, or even exposure to older Danish, the easier both Dutch and German gets. I think reading a lot of pre-WW1 novels helped my German quite a bit.
I'll note the biggest reason why Dutch may seem somewhat closer than modern German is that modern German is mostly High (Southern) German. Low German common in the Northern parts of Germany before lies closer to the continuum between Dutch and the Scandinavian languages (for example it didn't got through the same consonant shift and still has Dag for day/dag instead of Tag).
There are many words in Dutch that you might recognize as similar to Norwegian that you might be marginally more likely to fail to recognise in modern German because the spelling is slightly more different.
> is that modern German is mostly High (Southern) German
Absolutely not. South german is for me Badisch, Schwäbisch, Bayrisch und Alemannisch (Badian, Swabian, Bavarian and Alemmannian --- similar to Swabian, but with lots of differences, e.g. we have "gwä-Schwaben" und "xsi-Schwaben".
But perhaps my other understanding stems from the fact the "Hochdeutsch" (high german) can mean different things. E.g. the german wikipedia has a disambiguation page https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochdeutsch for it.
I interpreted it to be the "normal" german we all speak if we don't speak a german dialect. Or, in other words, the first link of that disambiguation page: standard german. And that is a result of some "norming process", initiated mostly by the brothers Grimm, i.E. they wrote the first generally accepted german dictionary. Generally we can say that this process started in the 17th century, with it's high in the 18th. So it's quite modern, long after dialects formed.
And they didn't life and work in southern Germany, but quite in the center, the area between Hanau and Göttingen. If we look for dialects there, when we see that they are influenced by frankonian and saxonian dialect --- not the modern day Saxonia, but the historical one. The border between both empires goes right through the working area of the Grimms, e.g. the german town "Frankfurt" has a "Sachsenhausen" at the over side of the river. Or north of Marburg you have "Frankenberg" and "Frankenau" but also "Sachsenberg" and another "Sachsenhausen". These old kingdoms created language differences ... but they have nothing to do with southern german dialects / languages.
However, the various "Plattdeutsch" dialects like Plattduitsk or Frisian are totally different, here you're correct. They are categorized usually as "lower german" (Platt => flat => lower), North See Germanic, West Germanic, Germanic, Indogermanic.
From my perspective South of the North sea coast is South ;) I'll agree it's not precise, but both links on the disambiguation page to my eye justifies my use of it, at least in this context.
I'm certainly willing to accept that there may well be significant aspects of standard German that incorporates more central and Northern dialects and deviates from the southern Hochdeutsch dialects in ways I have no idea about. I'm sure you know far better than me about that.
But the most relevant differences in the context of my comment was the High German consonant shift, the effects of which is one (of several, sure) big change separating Standard German from the other Germanic languages, and which was mostly firmly happening further South than Plattdeutsch/Niederdeutsch/Low German.
In that respect at least, standard German orthography is closer to that of South/Hochdeutsch, and it has separated German further from the rest of the Germanic languages.
E.g. compare:
* Day: dag (Scandinavian, Dutch), Dag (low German languages), Tag Standard and High German.
* Ship: skip (Norwegian, Swedish) , skib (Danish), Skip/Schip/Schipp/Schepp (various lower German variants, Frisian), Schiff (Standard and High German)
* Apple: eple, Appel, vs. Apfel
* two: to (Norwegian, Danish, två (Swedish, Norwegian dialects), twee (Dutch, lower German), zwei (Standard and High German)
The point is that Dutch has a lot of features that is shared with both low German and Scandinavian languages but that has disappeared from modern standard German, not that it has always been more similar to low German than to other German dialects.
E.g. like low German and most of the other West and North Germanic languages, Dutch did not go through the High German Consonant Shift, but modern standard German "imported" that.
That makes modern German a lot harder to read for Scandinavians in ways that Dutch simply isn't.
I often find it easier to read Dutch despite never having learnt it than I find reading German despite having had three years of German lessons in school.
And if you start digging into the shared vocabulary between Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, you'll find a whole lot of those words are words that have retained far more similarity to the low German dialects than the Scandinavian languages have to standard German.
See also my other comment on this, with some comparisons.
Note that this does also not necessarily go both ways - I'm totally willing to accept that you might find high German more similar than low German from your perspective because of different subsets of shared vocabulary or structure, for example.
“We must not introduce errors into a program out of carelessness. We must do it systematically and with care.”
Dijkstra’s statement appears to be a bit of dry humor. He’s known for his wit and often used irony in his statements. The idea of deliberately and carefully introducing errors into a program is clearly absurd, which is the joke. It’s his way of emphasizing the importance of being meticulous and systematic in programming to avoid errors.
I don't think the translator necessarily missed the joke, but had to fit the phrase in the available space (which is an issue when subtitling and an even bigger issue when dubbing)
As others have also mentioned, the most important thing you can do is show interest and engage with your son and his ideas. And that really requires only your time and maybe a pencil and a bit of paper.
Figure out what kind of game this is and what part of the design process he's most interested in. Maybe it's not so much the game but he just wants to design cool game characters and have them walk around?
If you both do want to make a computer game, I think the various Make-A-Game games, many of which have already been mentioned, are your best bet. Game Builder Garage or Super Mario Maker (Switch), Wonderbox: The Adventure Maker (Apple), RPG in a Box or Super Dungeon Maker (PC), Roblox, whichever is the best match to your son's ideas.
Unlike some others here, I would recommend against switching to 2D. From a didactic perspective it absolutely would be the way to go as it makes a great many things a lot more manageable, but from experience you run a big risk of losing engagement and interest, especially as your son explicitly wants 3D. For a lot of kids in that age group, 2D just isn't cool.
I'd also recommend against full-blown development environments like Godot or Unity, at least until he's just a bit older. When he gets to that point, Unity does have some neat templates made especially for kids, where they get kind of a starter game and a walk-through on how to build it out.
With Godot 4, the big difference between Godot and Godot .NET is that the version with NET support does not build to web and mobile support is 'experimental' ²). Also, they are two completely separate downloads and editor binaries, which makes switching languages decidedly non-trivial.
For a 2D game, if you can live without building to web, I'd pick Godot. Otherwise, I'd pick Unity.
¹) https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.2/Documentation/Manual/csharp-...
²) https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/scripting/c...