5 ms·

Game Oriented Assembly Lisp

47 points by gnosis 16y ago

srean 16y ago
So, Yahoo acquires Viaweb and rewrites it. The end result is inferior to the original Lisp-based product. Sony acquires Naughty Dog and decides to eliminate the Lisp-based development infrastructure. The end result is an inferior game development environment. Sure, there were probably a lot of reasons for these decisions by Yahoo and Sony (probably none of which had anything to do with productivity or technical excellence - large companies have other drivers which have more importance than these two); however, the end result for both companies has been something inferior to what they originally acquired. Quoted from http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html Edit: The post has more about in what respect the author considers the replacements inferior.
- GrooveStomp 16y ago
  This inferior game development environment led to two incredibly spectacular, well-rated games. In my opinion, Uncharted 1 and 2 completely eclipsed all of their previous work.
  - lispm 16y ago
    There were some presentations/talks about the use of Lisp/Scheme in the production of these games. For example: http://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog-GDC08-Adventures-In-Data-Compilation.pdf http://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog-GDC08-Adventures-...
maximilianburke 16y ago
Andy Gavin, one of Naughty Dog's co-founders, posted on HN a few weeks back summarizing his work with Lisp (and GOAL) and how he's now moved to Ruby: From the late 80s through the early 2000s Lisp was my language of choice. The post author went through many of its advantages -- mostly true. I even went so far as to write an entire compiler and environment (a several man-year endeavor) to design two different runtime oriented dialects called GOOL and GOAL used in 8 Naughty Dog Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter games. All 30-60 FPS action games -- 40 million copies sold. All written in Lisp! (more or less) Eventually, it was Ruby that got me off Lisp. It does most of what made Lisp great, and the support factor is huge. There are clean standard libraries for everything, the garbage collector is good (the one in ACL is was so awful and dated -- I last used it in '07 -- you pretty much had to turn it off. I miss the S expressions and the macros. But you can do most macro like things with a good block expression in Ruby, and you can even do auto-generated macro like functions with strings. It just isn't as elegant as Lisp. The Ruby class system is a bit baroque, but it's actually better in many ways than CLOS, which suffers from being too dated. In Ruby you can do a lot of very cool things with extend and include. It's just a slightly different way of thinking. The implementation isn't the fastest, but it's good. The Lisp implementations were all clunky and felt like 80s codebases. Oh wait, they are. Support. The rate of change in Ruby is 1000x that of Lisp. Some new website has an API -- someone writes a Gem immediately. In Lisp you don't even have a really standard networking library! (from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998321 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998321)
- plinkplonk 16y ago
  (Ruby's) "garbage collector is good (the one in ACL is was so awful and dated -- I last used it in '07 -- you pretty much had to turn it off." I found this interesting. Ruby doesn't have a particularly cutting edge GC afaik, just a standard mark and sweep collector [1]. Why does ACL, which is a commercial lisp and supposedly one of the better CL implementations at least technically[2], have a (relatively) terrible gc? [1]maybe this changed recently - I don't track Ruby or use it - but Andy is talking of 2007 [2] their licensing terms were terrible last I checked. If you use ACL to build a product you have to give them a chunk of your revenue forever (see the "Value Added Reseller" license at http://www.franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml#var http://www.franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml#var ) I am surprised anyone signs up for this.
- chrisaycock 16y ago
  This reminds me of Peter Norvig's move to Python: I came to Python not because I thought it was a better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better pseudocode. Several students claimed that they had a hard time mapping from the pseudocode in my AI textbook to the Lisp code that Russell and I had online. So I looked for the language that was most like our pseudocode, and found that Python was the best match. Then I had to teach myself enough Python to implement the examples from the textbook. I found that Python was very nice for certain types of small problems, and had the libraries I needed to integrate with lots of other stuff, at Google and elsewhere on the net. I think Lisp still has an edge for larger projects and for applications where the speed of the compiled code is important. But Python has the edge (with a large number of students) when the main goal is communication, not programming per se. In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice. (from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815)
  - 16y ago

47 points by gnosis 16y ago

srean 16y ago

So, Yahoo acquires Viaweb and rewrites it. The end result is inferior to the original Lisp-based product. Sony acquires Naughty Dog and decides to eliminate the Lisp-based development infrastructure. The end result is an inferior game development environment. Sure, there were probably a lot of reasons for these decisions by Yahoo and Sony (probably none of which had anything to do with productivity or technical excellence - large companies have other drivers which have more importance than these two); however, the end result for both companies has been something inferior to what they originally acquired. Quoted from http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060118.html Edit: The post has more about in what respect the author considers the replacements inferior.

GrooveStomp 16y ago
This inferior game development environment led to two incredibly spectacular, well-rated games. In my opinion, Uncharted 1 and 2 completely eclipsed all of their previous work.
- lispm 16y ago
  There were some presentations/talks about the use of Lisp/Scheme in the production of these games. For example: http://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog-GDC08-Adventures-In-Data-Compilation.pdf http://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog-GDC08-Adventures-...

maximilianburke 16y ago

Andy Gavin, one of Naughty Dog's co-founders, posted on HN a few weeks back summarizing his work with Lisp (and GOAL) and how he's now moved to Ruby: From the late 80s through the early 2000s Lisp was my language of choice. The post author went through many of its advantages -- mostly true. I even went so far as to write an entire compiler and environment (a several man-year endeavor) to design two different runtime oriented dialects called GOOL and GOAL used in 8 Naughty Dog Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter games. All 30-60 FPS action games -- 40 million copies sold. All written in Lisp! (more or less) Eventually, it was Ruby that got me off Lisp. It does most of what made Lisp great, and the support factor is huge. There are clean standard libraries for everything, the garbage collector is good (the one in ACL is was so awful and dated -- I last used it in '07 -- you pretty much had to turn it off. I miss the S expressions and the macros. But you can do most macro like things with a good block expression in Ruby, and you can even do auto-generated macro like functions with strings. It just isn't as elegant as Lisp. The Ruby class system is a bit baroque, but it's actually better in many ways than CLOS, which suffers from being too dated. In Ruby you can do a lot of very cool things with extend and include. It's just a slightly different way of thinking. The implementation isn't the fastest, but it's good. The Lisp implementations were all clunky and felt like 80s codebases. Oh wait, they are. Support. The rate of change in Ruby is 1000x that of Lisp. Some new website has an API -- someone writes a Gem immediately. In Lisp you don't even have a really standard networking library! (from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998321 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998321)

plinkplonk 16y ago
(Ruby's) "garbage collector is good (the one in ACL is was so awful and dated -- I last used it in '07 -- you pretty much had to turn it off." I found this interesting. Ruby doesn't have a particularly cutting edge GC afaik, just a standard mark and sweep collector [1]. Why does ACL, which is a commercial lisp and supposedly one of the better CL implementations at least technically[2], have a (relatively) terrible gc? [1]maybe this changed recently - I don't track Ruby or use it - but Andy is talking of 2007 [2] their licensing terms were terrible last I checked. If you use ACL to build a product you have to give them a chunk of your revenue forever (see the "Value Added Reseller" license at http://www.franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml#var http://www.franz.com/products/licensing/commercial.lhtml#var ) I am surprised anyone signs up for this.
chrisaycock 16y ago
This reminds me of Peter Norvig's move to Python: I came to Python not because I thought it was a better/acceptable/pragmatic Lisp, but because it was better pseudocode. Several students claimed that they had a hard time mapping from the pseudocode in my AI textbook to the Lisp code that Russell and I had online. So I looked for the language that was most like our pseudocode, and found that Python was the best match. Then I had to teach myself enough Python to implement the examples from the textbook. I found that Python was very nice for certain types of small problems, and had the libraries I needed to integrate with lots of other stuff, at Google and elsewhere on the net. I think Lisp still has an edge for larger projects and for applications where the speed of the compiled code is important. But Python has the edge (with a large number of students) when the main goal is communication, not programming per se. In terms of programming-in-the-large, at Google and elsewhere, I think that language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don't have those things you're in trouble regardless of your language choice. (from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1803815)
- 16y ago