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Thanks! You made me google Jonathan Blow and his language again (I've listened to his talk about a new language for game development some time ago, and I really

by nnq 11y ago

Thanks! You made me google Jonathan Blow and his language again (I've listened to his talk about a new language for game development some time ago, and I really like his thoughts on game design), and came across this on Jai's page https://sites.google.com/site/jailanguageprimer/ https://sites.google.com/site/jailanguageprimer/ : "Abstractions like RAII, constructors and destructors, polymorphism, and exceptions were invented with the intention of solving problems that game programmers don’t have, and with the result of interfering with the solutions to problems that game programmers do have." ...that's basically enough to make me never bother to look him up again. We don't need more special purpose languages, we need more general purpose ones. That's the cool thing about D and Rust and Go too. You can easily use the same language for anything from simple scripts (D even has rdmd that basically works like a ruby/python-style interpreter to run a file without even compiling!) to, I don't know, navigation control code for a drone. We really don't need more special purpose tools now, the hardware allows us to have languages that span the full spectrum from metal to web page (via compile-to-js, but still...), so let's use this. Yeah, full-spectrum languages will be neither C-like (like close enough to metal so you can see the resulting machine code in your head) nor Javascript-like (idiot-friendly but professional-hostile), so we should prepare for some "weirdness". It's not like we don't already know that this is possible since like 30 years ago: Lisp machines used one high level language for everything from OS to GUIs but and it worked great, with the exception that their price/performance ratio was horrible, but now we kind of solved the problem of building dirt-cheap machines, so we can get back to dreaming awesome stuff! And in the games world, I think that John Carmack has partially "seen the light" too, and maybe he'll convince more people of what he's seen ;)

kibwen 11y ago
Assuming that a special-purpose tool services a given need better than a general-purpose tool, the only reason to prefer the general tool is because the market for that service may not be sufficiently large to bear the cost of supporting a specialized tool. But in a niche whose market is perpetually growing, the preferred tools will become more and more specialized over time and sticking with a general solution will become less and less competitive. A shrinking market may experience the opposite effect. Regardless of whether Jai is a useful tool, the question of whether to pursue specialized tools for game development depends on where you see market demand for those tools heading in the next decade.

by nnq 11y ago

kibwen 11y ago

Assuming that a special-purpose tool services a given need better than a general-purpose tool, the only reason to prefer the general tool is because the market for that service may not be sufficiently large to bear the cost of supporting a specialized tool. But in a niche whose market is perpetually growing, the preferred tools will become more and more specialized over time and sticking with a general solution will become less and less competitive. A shrinking market may experience the opposite effect. Regardless of whether Jai is a useful tool, the question of whether to pursue specialized tools for game development depends on where you see market demand for those tools heading in the next decade.