We had this at another Sony studio I worked at. I asked why. The person who write it said writing the interpeter/compiler for lisp is quite easy. As is understa

We had this at another Sony studio I worked at. I asked why. The person who write it said writing the interpeter/compiler for lisp is quite easy. As is understanding the byte code. They did it as an intern project in about 3 months. It wasn't the most friendly language and ended up with many c like additions. At the end of the day it was all about cost to work on and efficiency of using. Many would have been super happy to slap a "real" language in there but they would have spent years putting the real time esque controls they needed on it. Not the normal real time but bound to game engine execution phases which is different. It also needed to very easily work with cpp and the art tree. I doubt any of the fp folks here would have loved the language and would have spent much of their kvetching time on why it wasn't more lispy and therefore more productive. Thing is most of what it needed to do was atomic thread and mutex/semaphore joins, branching parallel green threads and parallel wait conditions and goto. The scripts were all written by non programmers and when slow converted to c++ which was about 20kx faster.