WoW must be just a game to some people, but it is serious programming to its makers

I was stunned tonight when, while looking up something in Google, I came across something totally unexpected: an API for World of Warcraft.

This thing is not just big, it is huge. There are hundreds of functions in the WoW API! It almost resembles the size of the early Mac and MS-Windows APIs, way back when.

A scripting language called Lua is used to configuring the WoW GUI. I glanced at the language. It looks pretty powerful. It supports callbacks, so that opens the door to lots of serious, non-trivial programming.

I knew there was a huge World of Warcraft community. I have seen the game played before, over at a coffee shop. It is a neat-looking game. At the prices they charge for the game, and the monthly subscription fees they charge to access its MMORPG server - considering how popular it seems to be - Blizzard must be pulling in some major cash.

But.... it's just a game. Then I thought about it. Well, so are professional sports, when you get right down to it. People take that pretty seriously too. And it's a multibillion dollar industry.

So I guess having a huge, pretty serious API for a gigantic computer game should not be all that surprising. Not sure I would ever use either one. But it does have an impressive heft to it, I must say.