Summary

1969: Ken Thompson led a team to implement Unix, and made B, to create utilities for it

1972: Dennis Ritchie, tried to improve B, ended up creating C

1973: Unix was mostly rewritten in C

1977: Stephen Johnson's Portable C Compiler served as the basis for implementations on new platforms

1978: Brian Kernighan and Ritchie published the K&R book which served as an informal specification for it

1989: ANSI standardized C

1990: ISO adopted ANSI C

1995: C95 corrected some stuff

1999: C99 introduced many things, many had already been implemented as extensions in compilers

2008: Embedded programming features, not available in standard C, were added to it

2011: C11 added many things, most of which were already common in other languages

2018: C18 corrected some stuff

“The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.”
— Andrew S. Tanenbaum

“Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed.”
— Linus Torvalds

“Unix was built for me. I didn't build it as an operating system for other people, I built it to do games, and to do my stuff. I was always into games, games was my thing.”
— Ken Thompson

“He is equally excited by games, puzzles, and technology creation, and I don't think he really distinguishes among them.”
— Dennis Ritchie, about Ken

“The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate since we haven’t had ours. It prevents people with seeds of good ideas from getting started.”
— Mark Zuckerberg

Noteworthy functions that became obsolete
Moving from GameMaker 8.* to GameMaker Studio 1.4.*, these functions were made obsolete, to focus on fast cross platform development.

• screen_*, display_*, window_*
• variable_* and other dynamice resource management
• execute_*, script_get_text, and dynamic code execution
• file_* and anything based on the Windows API
• io_* and other low-level I/O manipulation
• error_*

#GML

History of GameMaker: "Game Maker"

1999, summer: The development of Animo, developed in #Delphi by Mark Overmars, a professor at the University of Utrecht, started.

1999, 15 November: V1.1, a simple 2D animation designing tool with a limited visual scripting language, was publicly released. V1.4 made it possible to generate executables. Subsequent releases changed the name to "Game Maker" and moved towards more general-purpose 2D game development.

2000, September: V2.0 was released, which first used #DirectX for sounds, but not graphics.

2001: V3.0 was released and now also used DirectX for graphics. It saved games as .gmf files.

2001, July: V4.0, rewritten from scratch, was released. The GUI was completely revised and took the form that was more or less preserved in later versions. The file extension was changed to .gmd.

2003, April: V5.0 was released and had a completely new interpreter, making games considerably faster. Although it had been freeware up to v5.0, later versions introduced an optional registration fee.

2004, January: V5.3 introduced many features for registered users, including: particle systems, networking, and DLLs.

2004, October: V6.0 was released. The runtime's drawing pipeline migrated from VCL to Direct3D. This led to sprites, better fonts, primitives, and 3D graphics, but it also broke compatibility. The file extension was changed to .gm6. V6.1 added surfaces.

2007: Growing public interest led Overmars to seek help in expanding the program, which led to partnership with YoYo Games, and Overmars retained a position as one of company's directors.

2007, January: V7.0 was released under the partnership with YoYo Games. It introduced the use of extensions. The file extension was changed to .gmk.

To create a "YouTube for games", the now archived YoYo Games Sandbox website was created a for uploading and playing Game Maker games, and became quite a success.

2009, December: V8.0 was released. Sprites and the built-in sprite editor were greatly improved, making it much easier to use alpha transparency.

2011, April: V8.1 changed the name to GameMaker (lacking a space) to avoid confusion with the 1991 software Game-Maker. The runtime was rewritten in #CPP to address performance concerns with previous versions. The file extension was changed to .gm81.

Because of competing projects such as G-Java, G-Creator, LateralGM, etc., the editable game files were encrypted since v.7.0. However, it was not long before the encryptions were broken.

— Summary from game-maker.nl

History of GameMaker: "GameMaker: Studio"

2012, May: GameMaker: Studio was launched as a completely new series that targeted commercial developers instead of hobbyists, and supported: #Windows, #Mac_OS (in development since 2007), #HTML5 (in development since 2011), #Android, #iOS, and many other platforms and OSs.

It also completely changed the projects structure: each project is a folder with all resources as individual .gmx files in #XML format. This allows version control, and thus collaboration. Another new feature is a built-in Box2D physics engine.

Since the launch of Studio, the product has been fully developed by YoYo Games. This makes Game Maker 8.x a closed chapter.

2015, February: GameMaker was acquired by Playtech together with YoYo Games. Announcements reassured improvements and plans to appeal to more advanced developers. They also promised GameMaker Studio 2.0. Nothing was changed for developers.

2016, November: GameMaker Studio 2 beta was released.

2017, March: GameMaker Studio 2, with a completely redesigned IDE rewritten in #CSharp, was released.

Present
Currently, a single code base can run natively across multiple platforms including Android, iOS, HTML5, PS4, Xbox One, Windows Desktop, OS X, Ubuntu, Windows UWP.

Future
GameMaker Studio 2 Roadmap

No idea is too correct for it to not need reinvention; not even the wheel.

Junior developer: "I found the bug"
Senior developer: "I found a bug"

“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”
— Immanuel Kant

“I don't believe in the sort of eureka moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time. And it wasn't that suddenly it came to him.”
— Tim Berners-Lee

“I am on the verge of mysteries and the veil is getting thinner and thinner. The nights seem to me too long... I am often scolded by Madame Pasteur, but I tell her I shall lead her to fame.”
— Louis Pasteur

“Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.”
— John Naisbitt

Let the age of approximations be over. Stop formulating the reality with the ironically named "real" numbers. Existence is discrete in every way. Continuity is an impossibility. Even Democritus knew this.

To be fair, Zeno was the one who beat his intellect into submission.

A machine that would be left dormant forever without human intervention is not truly intelligent.

Data must be meaningful for the machine, not [just] meaningful to us.

Said meaning must be communicate-able among several separate subjects, to ensure its evolution and prevent its corruption.

2⁸

Most features in languages are solutions to problems that could've been avoided entirely.

Programming means writing a program;
meta-programming means writing a program that writes a program, possibly itself.