I got my start from Starcraft Broodwars map editor. It was comprised of if then conditions and actions. Very simple system and i'll bet there are a good amount of people that were inspired by a system like it.
Totally, the Starcraft editor got a lot of things right:
- It looked like text but you were actually working with a statically typed AST -> Syntax errors were impossible.
- Commands were sentences with the parameters where you would except them, e.g. "PLAYER brings AMOUNT UNIT to region REGION.". Also, the commands were translated so you didn't need to learn English to learn programming.
- Since you were programming on top of an existing game you had very high level commands at your disposal which allowed you to get impressive results with little effort.
- It looked like text but you were actually working with a statically typed AST -> Syntax errors were impossible. - Commands were sentences with the parameters where you would except them, e.g. "PLAYER brings AMOUNT UNIT to region REGION.". Also, the commands were translated so you didn't need to learn English to learn programming. - Since you were programming on top of an existing game you had very high level commands at your disposal which allowed you to get impressive results with little effort.