I generally find that the people who have gone to school for many years and learned programming always see solutions instead of problems. If you ask them to code something huge they will say “Sure, let me think about it for a bit” and come up with some solution. The homegrown programmer will most often need some pushing and arguing before he agrees to code the thing.

However i don’t know if this has anything to do with knowledge about C and C++. As i see it it is indeed possible to make awesome games, or parts of games, without knowing anything about C. But i can’t help feeling that the methodology that you learn while learning the C styles might affect how you do programming in all other languages as well?

But i must say that i agree with you. There’s absolutely no need to learn C ++ unless you want to work as a PROGRAMMER at one of the big game studios. I started learning C++ because i wanted to do game design and needed to be able to code. It took about 3 months before i gave up and swore i would never code again….that was until i met Javascript + PHP, which then took me to Actionscript 2+3, and C# (which i found a lot easier than C++). I am however still lacking a LOT of experience and knowledge that i would have gotten if i had studied to be a programmer.

I do think it is important to know where you want to end up in the game industry. Working at a large studio is very different than working as an indie. But the thing is – if you come from outside the business and want to break in, then how the heck are you supposed to know where to start? You go to the big studios, see their job listing, see C and C++ everywhere and think “okay, i need to learn this…”.

Someone should make a huge portal with tutorials and guides on how to make games without having a PhD. in computer science and outside the studios

I think my go to for “people with some sort of answer” regarding flash games and flash game dev is the mochi forums.

Other gamedev, er, it really depends.