4 ms·

A bit tangential, but I did (heavily so) jumped into D before D2 and kind of got burned with that. I married D1 which was more in-line with "a better C" and the

A bit tangential, but I did (heavily so) jumped into D before D2 and kind of got burned with that. I married D1 which was more in-line with "a better C" and then everyone decided D2 was the way to go, which was more "a better C++". It was to be expected though since language was in flux a lot at the time. Ada is a stable language though. I get what goatlover and Avshalom here are talking about here. That it's not fashionable (anymore). If we remove ourselves from that, are there any specific technical reasons why Ada hasn't been picked up by, let's say, C++ programmers? That is, audience that needs performance, yet also a nicer and safer language. With Lisp(s) there was a long period of basically having to pay for a good implementation and runtime deployments to Franz for Allegro if you wanted to do something well on desktop. I recall only Nichimen with Mirai and Nendo doing it, and it was fabulous. Makes you think about what would happen if tooling was free at the time, or at least more affordable. From everything I've seen, so far, Ada seems to be technically ready language to do game development, where probably most of language-curious crowd lives these days. I'm not sure about mobile support though (gcc on Android or whatever it is on iOS). Every now and then I take a week of spare/hobby time and endeavour into new and weird technical spaces. Maybe, my next one will be in Ada space.

pjmlp 10y ago
Many C++ developers are former "type safe language fans" that is the tribe you see on the corner discussing how to use strings, vectors, class enums, shared pointers, class abstractions for IO ports... But it is hard to justify management to go out and buy Ada compilers, with tooling that isn't on par with C++ ones. Also on the embedded markets you still have company selling plain C compilers or when they sell C++ compilers it is still C++03. Those guys will hardly invest to building an Ada one. For game developers, their culture is a bit different. They only change language when forced by the OS and SDK vendors to do so. That is how they moved from Assembly into C/Pascal, then from those into C++.
lispm 10y ago
Lisp on Windows has a long tradition, but all useful implementations with platform integration and good GUI support for it were and still are commercial. Corman CL. Cheap. Native. Abandoned and now open source / free. Golden Common Lisp. mid-price, lots of functionality. No longer competitive. Procyon CL. Expensive. Bought by Franz and taken from the market and used to develop a first Allegro CL for Windows offering. LispWorks. Expensive. Allegro CL: Expensive. Lots of functionality. Nowadays a merge of the former Windows and Unix versions. There are free ones like Clozure CL, GCL, SBCL. But most of them lack platform integration. Btw., Nendo was written in C++.
- Keyframe 10y ago
  I didn't know Nendo was C++. Somehow I thought since Mirai was Allegro that Nendo was also. TIL! Mirai was so ahead of its time, and I remember people were boasting Lisp had a lot to do with it (small team, big features and lots of them!). Of course, team was amazing - that was the primary reason. SBCL kind of got better over the years though.
  - lispm 10y ago
    Nendo was originally developed in C++ for the Nintendo 64 system. It wasn't released there, but as a Wintel application. > Mirai was so ahead of its time. Mirai is actually based on earlier code: N-World from Nichimen, which was a port of S-Graphics of Symbolics, which was written in the early 1980s. http://lispm.de/symbolics-3/symbolics-3.html http://lispm.de/symbolics-3/symbolics-3.html > SBCL kind of got better over the years though. If you look at CL Windows applications, they are either written in a custom Common Lisp implementation or Allegro CL / LispWorks. Free software / open source Lisp has never supported Windows very well. Most of the time the Lisp was running without much integration and very little support for the Microsoft eco-system. Companies tried to target the market of Windows users. Open source / free software Lisp developers were never particular interested in Windows for their own use
jonathanstrange 10y ago
I wouldn't recommend Ada for game development. First of all, the added safety is overkill for games. Second, you need to create bindings to libraries, and as we all know, C++ does not have a well-defined library interface to the outside world. You'll end up writing tons of fragile glue code, and still get all the crashes. ;) Third, mobile support and general portability is abysmal.

pjmlp 10y ago

Many C++ developers are former "type safe language fans" that is the tribe you see on the corner discussing how to use strings, vectors, class enums, shared pointers, class abstractions for IO ports... But it is hard to justify management to go out and buy Ada compilers, with tooling that isn't on par with C++ ones. Also on the embedded markets you still have company selling plain C compilers or when they sell C++ compilers it is still C++03. Those guys will hardly invest to building an Ada one. For game developers, their culture is a bit different. They only change language when forced by the OS and SDK vendors to do so. That is how they moved from Assembly into C/Pascal, then from those into C++.

lispm 10y ago

Lisp on Windows has a long tradition, but all useful implementations with platform integration and good GUI support for it were and still are commercial. Corman CL. Cheap. Native. Abandoned and now open source / free. Golden Common Lisp. mid-price, lots of functionality. No longer competitive. Procyon CL. Expensive. Bought by Franz and taken from the market and used to develop a first Allegro CL for Windows offering. LispWorks. Expensive. Allegro CL: Expensive. Lots of functionality. Nowadays a merge of the former Windows and Unix versions. There are free ones like Clozure CL, GCL, SBCL. But most of them lack platform integration. Btw., Nendo was written in C++.

Keyframe 10y ago
I didn't know Nendo was C++. Somehow I thought since Mirai was Allegro that Nendo was also. TIL! Mirai was so ahead of its time, and I remember people were boasting Lisp had a lot to do with it (small team, big features and lots of them!). Of course, team was amazing - that was the primary reason. SBCL kind of got better over the years though.
- lispm 10y ago
  Nendo was originally developed in C++ for the Nintendo 64 system. It wasn't released there, but as a Wintel application. > Mirai was so ahead of its time. Mirai is actually based on earlier code: N-World from Nichimen, which was a port of S-Graphics of Symbolics, which was written in the early 1980s. http://lispm.de/symbolics-3/symbolics-3.html http://lispm.de/symbolics-3/symbolics-3.html > SBCL kind of got better over the years though. If you look at CL Windows applications, they are either written in a custom Common Lisp implementation or Allegro CL / LispWorks. Free software / open source Lisp has never supported Windows very well. Most of the time the Lisp was running without much integration and very little support for the Microsoft eco-system. Companies tried to target the market of Windows users. Open source / free software Lisp developers were never particular interested in Windows for their own use

jonathanstrange 10y ago

I wouldn't recommend Ada for game development. First of all, the added safety is overkill for games. Second, you need to create bindings to libraries, and as we all know, C++ does not have a well-defined library interface to the outside world. You'll end up writing tons of fragile glue code, and still get all the crashes. ;) Third, mobile support and general portability is abysmal.