4 ms·

What would be the immediate benefits of this? Would it be mostly related to multithreading? And on a side note: As a NoScript user, I'm surprised that I've had

What would be the immediate benefits of this? Would it be mostly related to multithreading? And on a side note: As a NoScript user, I'm surprised that I've had to give Javascript permissions to Twitter just so I can visit that idsoftware.com link inside of the tweet. Obviously I don't visit Twitter often, but that should never be the case for it or any site.

dllthomas 13y ago
Immediate benefits of porting an ancient game that runs fine on just about anything? It's not about the result, but the process of building it. Lessons learned can be applied to situations where the result does matter (and, hopefully, blogged about).
sultezdukes 13y ago
I recall Carmack used to go on week-long Sabbaticals, where he would lug his computer to a hotel room and do research. It's probably along those lines, though I doubt his wife and kid(s) would allow him to do that these days ;)
dubcanada 13y ago
It's fun... He's a developer who enjoys doing stuff, it doesn't matter if it has a purpose. To him it does, and he has enough followers that he felt he should share it with people, which makes sense considering I can't wait to see the result. And I'm sorry, but if you turn off javascript this day and age you should expect more sites to not work then to work. You're turning off part of the browser, and you do not like having to turn it on to use the browser? Seems a little backwards to me... considering the extremely small population of noscript users. I also understand that I'll probably get down voted into oblivion as every single noscript users is probably on this site. But it's true...
- RexRollman 13y ago
  I think he was just surprised that something like a simple link needed Javascript.
- honestcoyote 13y ago
  It's reasonable to expect disabling javascript to have a negative effect upon a webpage which is performing some relatively complicated function. If I was running noscript, with no whitelist, and tried to use Google Calendar, I'd expect reduced or zero functionality. But Twitter's main purpose in life, for end users, is to display text and links. There's absolutely no reason why disabling javascript should cause a link to be inaccessible. This is a legitimate complaint.
  - dubcanada 13y ago
    And websites are also not just text and links anymore. Twitter would probably have to put man hours into making what ever work for noscript, they don't just do something for no reason. But spending effort even thinking about users without javascript is in my mind a waste of effort. Anyways I agree that he should still be able to see text/link. But I turned on the site in Google Chrome, with javascript turned off... And it worked perfectly fine. He however has "noscript" which does not work that way, and does stuff preventing the site from doing normal functionality... Completely his fault.
    - blub 13y ago
      Not a waste of effort, just one more step away from the roots of the web. If someone can't gracefully degrade images, text and links they are a failure of a web developer and have betrayed what the web should stand for.
    - papsosouid 13y ago
      >And websites are also not just text and links anymore Twitter is. Twitter is an absolute clusterfuck technology wise, they are the prime example of doing everything wrong. Defending their idiocy does not reflect highly on you.
- SquareWheel 13y ago
  No, I'd agree. I've stopped building <noscript> tags into my sites as virtually every browser supports Javascript now. If folks are smart enough to turn off Javascript they're just as capable of turning it back on. I personally block Flash by default (mostly to stop audio ads), and I have no problem turning it back on when a site requires it.
  - blub 13y ago
    Folks don't want to turn it on, because it's not needed for most cases and it's the perfect way (after flash and java) to get malware. I don't know what's happening to web development, but since this app fever developers are fighting for eye candy and LESS accessibility. Sometimes I see a page that fails to work without JS, open the source and see just JS code. Where is the content? Web apps are often times also walled gardens, and completely break the functionality of the browser (based on linking, rendering text & images and using the back button). Now even simple websites completely disable access to content just to show some silly animation.
    - the_gipsy 13y ago
      I can't think of a way of getting malware from JavaScript anymore than from a simple link, that's just plain false. The move to "web-page-apps" is not about eye candy, it's about speed, responsiveness and yes, usability. About not trying to awkwardly force an app down the http/html way. A broken website/app is simply broken: if things do not work as expected, that's not the fault of webapps per se or JavaScript - it's all doable and not a big deal anymore (the back button thing).
      - eliasmacpherson 13y ago
        google have a whole competition devoted to the basic idea. it's called pwnium. http://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.ie/2013/02/exploiting-64-bit-linux-like-boss.html http://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.ie/2013/02/exploiting-64-...
      - papsosouid 13y ago
RexRollman 13y ago
I think the Twitter link / Javascript issue is caused by Twitter's wrapping all links into their URL shortening system.
angrycoder 13y ago
I'm not John Carmack, but I spent 2 hours today trying to implement basic cryptography ciphers in Racket. What was the immediate benefit? Nothing, but it was fun.
- prezjordan 13y ago
  During Hurricane Sandy I used the last of my MacBook Air's battery to code up a Huffman Coding processor in Haskell. Same reason: no reason, just fun. (Hell of a way to pass time, too)
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Same here. Recently I just re-wrote a language runtime from a toy compiler I had, from C to Assembly. Was a rational thing to do? Maybe not, but it was fun to do.
dietrichepp 13y ago
The benefits of functional programming languages have been discussed before in the game industry, notably by Tim Sweeney. Sorry for the PowerPoint presentation: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/06/Tim-POPL.ppt http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/06/Tim-POPL.ppt The crux is that there are a lot of tools available when working with functional programming languages that allow programmers to avoid pitfalls common when working with mutable structures. The fact is, game programming is very different in some ways from, say, web programming. In web programming, you modify small parts of the system at a time and you probably have a nice database with ACID guarantees, you can wrap changes in a transaction and get on with your life, or just make small changes without transactions. Games just use big collections of in-memory objects to represent a complex state that changes significantly every frame, and if that was how your web application worked you'd probably call it fragile. I can give a more concrete example. Suppose you write a quick game where you shoot missiles at invading aliens. You register a collision between the missile and the alien, so you send a "collide" event to both. Except the missile responds to the collision by exploding, which deletes the alien object, and in C++ you might send a "collide" event to a dangling pointer instead of the alien space ship. Yes, there are lots of tools you can use to fix this. "Use immutable data structures" is one of the more fool-proof ways to do it. So right there, by using immutable data structures everywhere, you've eliminated certain classes of bugs. This becomes more important when you have multithreaded applications: immutable data is just inherently nice when you're using several cores: you can get rid of a bunch of locks and other synchronization techniques, many of which are a constant source of difficult-to-debug bugs for even experienced developers.
- wtetzner 13y ago
  Here's a PDF version of the slides: http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-...
ajanuary 13y ago
> As a NoScript user, I'm surprised that I've had to give Javascript permissions to Twitter just so I can visit that idsoftware.com link inside of the tweet. Really? Because it works just fine for me. Maybe they're doing some sort of A/B testing or partial roll-out around links?
ufo 13y ago
IMO, the biggest benefit of Haskellis that it collects lots of programming language advancements that have been mostly ignored by the mainstream until recently. Haskell does generics really well, has some really cool abstraction facilities (leading to cool things like parser combinators, and a rich typeclass ecosystem) and the type system is really good at letting you write code that is correct if you manage to compile it. I think its still too early to say that Haskell gives immediate, quantifiable, benefits for multithreading but it sure gives more avenues to tame your code and lots of freedom for people to code different concurrency solutions on top of it.

dllthomas 13y ago

Immediate benefits of porting an ancient game that runs fine on just about anything? It's not about the result, but the process of building it. Lessons learned can be applied to situations where the result does matter (and, hopefully, blogged about).

sultezdukes 13y ago

I recall Carmack used to go on week-long Sabbaticals, where he would lug his computer to a hotel room and do research. It's probably along those lines, though I doubt his wife and kid(s) would allow him to do that these days ;)

dubcanada 13y ago

It's fun... He's a developer who enjoys doing stuff, it doesn't matter if it has a purpose. To him it does, and he has enough followers that he felt he should share it with people, which makes sense considering I can't wait to see the result. And I'm sorry, but if you turn off javascript this day and age you should expect more sites to not work then to work. You're turning off part of the browser, and you do not like having to turn it on to use the browser? Seems a little backwards to me... considering the extremely small population of noscript users. I also understand that I'll probably get down voted into oblivion as every single noscript users is probably on this site. But it's true...

RexRollman 13y ago
I think he was just surprised that something like a simple link needed Javascript.
honestcoyote 13y ago
It's reasonable to expect disabling javascript to have a negative effect upon a webpage which is performing some relatively complicated function. If I was running noscript, with no whitelist, and tried to use Google Calendar, I'd expect reduced or zero functionality. But Twitter's main purpose in life, for end users, is to display text and links. There's absolutely no reason why disabling javascript should cause a link to be inaccessible. This is a legitimate complaint.
- dubcanada 13y ago
  And websites are also not just text and links anymore. Twitter would probably have to put man hours into making what ever work for noscript, they don't just do something for no reason. But spending effort even thinking about users without javascript is in my mind a waste of effort. Anyways I agree that he should still be able to see text/link. But I turned on the site in Google Chrome, with javascript turned off... And it worked perfectly fine. He however has "noscript" which does not work that way, and does stuff preventing the site from doing normal functionality... Completely his fault.
  - blub 13y ago
    Not a waste of effort, just one more step away from the roots of the web. If someone can't gracefully degrade images, text and links they are a failure of a web developer and have betrayed what the web should stand for.
  - papsosouid 13y ago
    >And websites are also not just text and links anymore Twitter is. Twitter is an absolute clusterfuck technology wise, they are the prime example of doing everything wrong. Defending their idiocy does not reflect highly on you.
SquareWheel 13y ago
No, I'd agree. I've stopped building <noscript> tags into my sites as virtually every browser supports Javascript now. If folks are smart enough to turn off Javascript they're just as capable of turning it back on. I personally block Flash by default (mostly to stop audio ads), and I have no problem turning it back on when a site requires it.
- blub 13y ago
  Folks don't want to turn it on, because it's not needed for most cases and it's the perfect way (after flash and java) to get malware. I don't know what's happening to web development, but since this app fever developers are fighting for eye candy and LESS accessibility. Sometimes I see a page that fails to work without JS, open the source and see just JS code. Where is the content? Web apps are often times also walled gardens, and completely break the functionality of the browser (based on linking, rendering text & images and using the back button). Now even simple websites completely disable access to content just to show some silly animation.
  - the_gipsy 13y ago
    I can't think of a way of getting malware from JavaScript anymore than from a simple link, that's just plain false. The move to "web-page-apps" is not about eye candy, it's about speed, responsiveness and yes, usability. About not trying to awkwardly force an app down the http/html way. A broken website/app is simply broken: if things do not work as expected, that's not the fault of webapps per se or JavaScript - it's all doable and not a big deal anymore (the back button thing).
    - eliasmacpherson 13y ago
      google have a whole competition devoted to the basic idea. it's called pwnium. http://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.ie/2013/02/exploiting-64-bit-linux-like-boss.html http://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.ie/2013/02/exploiting-64-...
    - papsosouid 13y ago

RexRollman 13y ago

I think the Twitter link / Javascript issue is caused by Twitter's wrapping all links into their URL shortening system.

angrycoder 13y ago

I'm not John Carmack, but I spent 2 hours today trying to implement basic cryptography ciphers in Racket. What was the immediate benefit? Nothing, but it was fun.

prezjordan 13y ago
During Hurricane Sandy I used the last of my MacBook Air's battery to code up a Huffman Coding processor in Haskell. Same reason: no reason, just fun. (Hell of a way to pass time, too)
pjmlp 13y ago
Same here. Recently I just re-wrote a language runtime from a toy compiler I had, from C to Assembly. Was a rational thing to do? Maybe not, but it was fun to do.

dietrichepp 13y ago

The benefits of functional programming languages have been discussed before in the game industry, notably by Tim Sweeney. Sorry for the PowerPoint presentation: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/06/Tim-POPL.ppt http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/06/Tim-POPL.ppt The crux is that there are a lot of tools available when working with functional programming languages that allow programmers to avoid pitfalls common when working with mutable structures. The fact is, game programming is very different in some ways from, say, web programming. In web programming, you modify small parts of the system at a time and you probably have a nice database with ACID guarantees, you can wrap changes in a transaction and get on with your life, or just make small changes without transactions. Games just use big collections of in-memory objects to represent a complex state that changes significantly every frame, and if that was how your web application worked you'd probably call it fragile. I can give a more concrete example. Suppose you write a quick game where you shoot missiles at invading aliens. You register a collision between the missile and the alien, so you send a "collide" event to both. Except the missile responds to the collision by exploding, which deletes the alien object, and in C++ you might send a "collide" event to a dangling pointer instead of the alien space ship. Yes, there are lots of tools you can use to fix this. "Use immutable data structures" is one of the more fool-proof ways to do it. So right there, by using immutable data structures everywhere, you've eliminated certain classes of bugs. This becomes more important when you have multithreaded applications: immutable data is just inherently nice when you're using several cores: you can get rid of a bunch of locks and other synchronization techniques, many of which are a constant source of difficult-to-debug bugs for even experienced developers.

wtetzner 13y ago
Here's a PDF version of the slides: http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-...

ajanuary 13y ago

> As a NoScript user, I'm surprised that I've had to give Javascript permissions to Twitter just so I can visit that idsoftware.com link inside of the tweet. Really? Because it works just fine for me. Maybe they're doing some sort of A/B testing or partial roll-out around links?

ufo 13y ago

IMO, the biggest benefit of Haskellis that it collects lots of programming language advancements that have been mostly ignored by the mainstream until recently. Haskell does generics really well, has some really cool abstraction facilities (leading to cool things like parser combinators, and a rich typeclass ecosystem) and the type system is really good at letting you write code that is correct if you manage to compile it. I think its still too early to say that Haskell gives immediate, quantifiable, benefits for multithreading but it sure gives more avenues to tame your code and lots of freedom for people to code different concurrency solutions on top of it.