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Personally, it's just interesting to see the original creator start such a port. Especially when the original creator is of the calibur that Carmark is.

• taeric 14y ago
  Oh, no doubt. I guess I'm just prejudiced by seeing "case stories" held up as some sort of "see, this person was able to do it, language/technique/tool/whatever X is ready for everyone to use! And will solve all problems!" So, yeah, I'm projecting. No, I don't know why. :( Sorry.
  • sillysaurus 14y ago
    It's healthy to be skeptical. But it's unhealthier not to try everything and discover what works. It's pretty rare for someone to immediately see which of several possible new inventions might be better (and why they're better). I'm referring to the inventor -- an inventor often has several possibilities for new things he could try to do, and he has to choose which of those to pursue. It's not at all obvious which path to choose. So most of the time, you just try all possibilities as fast as possible, letting intuition guide you. For example, it probably wasn't immediately obvious to DHH that it was a win to write websites in Ruby until he'd tried writing websites in Ruby to see how it'd turn out. History tends to get rewritten so that it's obvious in hindsight that it would work. But it wasn't at all obvious until it was suddenly obvious to him, which was only after he'd had the experience of trying it. So the interesting aspect here is that Carmack's intuition has told him that there might be something worthwhile for the videogame industry to look into functional programming languages. It probably won't pan out. But if there's any way it can, then Carmack will find out how to make it a pragmatic way for studios to build large codebases.
    • Paradigma11 14y ago
      I am currently reading through the phd thesis of the project: https://casanova.codeplex.com/ https://casanova.codeplex.com/ A domain specific language for games based on f#. Looks interesting and they have many examples a fully fledged rts included. The thesis is buried in the sourcecode https://casanova.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/25552 https://casanova.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/2...
    • merijnv 14y ago
      Not just Carmack, Tim Sweeney (Epic Games) has held a presentation at POPL discussing the value of functional programming for games: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/06/Tim-POPL.ppt http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/06/Tim-POPL.ppt
  • pandaman 14y ago
    In the game industry such stories are important. Unless you are either a celebrity or a unknown indie you have to use such a story to back up every decision you make. For example, before id Software's DOOM nobody would write a game in C just because no high profile game had been written in C. Of course, Wolf 3D won't become a case but, if it goes okay, it could be a step to a case for Haskell eventually.
    • taeric 14y ago
      I guess my entire point is that this will definitely lead to more questions. It will likely not lead to any direct answers. I welcome the questions, I have grown weary of premature answers.
    • Narishma 14y ago
      Wolf 3D was written in C for the most part.