I definitely agree with this kind of approach to programming, from a learning point of view, one can go in and play with the mechanics to see the cause and effect in real time. the game as a whole is too much to think about for a beginner which is why modding is so popular. I was modding long before I started to thing about making my own engine. the problem with most mod able games is that the tools given suck and so many would be modders are overwhelmed right for the start. the text editor has severed us well and will continue to do so in the future but as games and programs become larger and more complex we need to explore new ways to interact with them both from a learning point of view and just being able to work on such large projects in an effect manner. My vision is to create a game engine that we work on from the inside so the game engine is the editor and the compile is integrated into the engine. when we make changes to lazarus we can apply those changes and reboot to exactly where we were, like we never left at all. so why shouldn't our game engine be able to do the same.