Jai Language Primer

When we look at Lisp we see archaic user interfaces, legacy keywords such as car, cdr and cons which bear no meaning to us mere mortals. Also no clear consensus on what extensions to use. Why are there so many dialects? Can you not agree on something that works? Where is your IDE with error underlining and autocomplete list that comes up with each keystroke? And finally s-expressions, which make you twist your mind in order to write and don't give clear structure of the code meaning to the reader, and not even considering macros...

Not trying to start an argument, but that's my view from a C#'er who tried Lisp a while ago. I often see Lisp talked about on HN as though it's the solution to all our problems, but it's really not. Syntax is a big deal in programming languages, with lots of trade offs between human readability and unambiguous parsing by the computer, and s-exps aren't some magic bullet for this.

Minecraft is a special case, as the amount of voxels in memory and the constant loading and deloading of blocks of the map every few seconds, means that memory management is incredibly important to the game. That's why the C++ version was more performant, as John Carmack had full control of both the memory layouts and lifetimes, and could fine tune it all to fit the game.

This is the only reason C++ is still in wide use today, in order for games to limit load times they have to do nasty 'unsafe' tricks (such as loading a block of memory from disk straight into an address space, and just assigning pointers to it), in order to get good performance. But if your game isn't open world (such as minecraft, GTA, Fallout), then using a garbage collected language will be fine (as long it's not stop the world, but runs concurrently).

Doesn't Nim use garbage collection?

Also the compiler isn't even stable, it is an interesting language but can't be take seriously for professional development yet.

>When we look at Lisp we see archaic user interfaces, legacy keywords such as car, cdr and cons which bear no meaning to us mere mortals. Also no clear consensus on what extensions to use.

Car, cdr, and cons take very little time to understand, but yes their meaning is steeped in history. "car" returns the first element of a pair, "cdr" (pronounced like "could-er") returns the second element of a pair, and "cons" creates pairs. Not that bad. However, today's Lisps put more emphasis on using pattern matchers than manually car/cdring down lists.

>Why are there so many dialects?

That's like asking "Why are there so many ALGOL derivatives?" Lisp classifies a family of languages, not a single language. It's like saying something has C-like syntax.

>Can you not agree on something that works?

Given the above misunderstanding, this question is no longer relevant.

>Where is your IDE with error underlining and autocomplete list that comes up with each keystroke?

A lot of Lisp hackers use Emacs with a few extensions. I am a Guile Scheme user, so I can only speak for my setup: Emacs, Paredit, and Geiser. Paredit provides efficient, and powerful structured editing support for s-expressions. Geiser provides REPL integration. Geiser can autocomplete symbols, jump to the definition points of variables, display documentation for a procedure or macro, show the values of variables under the cursor in the modeline, show function signatures in the modeline, and allow instant evaluation of arbitrary expressions with a simple keystroke (including jumping to the debugger when things go wrong), and probably some other things that I'm forgetting. It is the nicest development environment I have ever used. Common Lisp users also like Emacs and Paredit, but they typically use SLIME for REPL integration.

> And finally s-expressions, which make you twist your mind in order to write and don't give clear structure of the code meaning to the reader, and not even considering macros...

We'll have to disagree here. S-expressions are very nice, once you get used to them, which can be a bit difficult if your background is using C-like languages with infix notation. They remove complexity, make the language more regular (the operator is always the first element of a list, things that are operators in some languages like +, -, etc. are normal procedures that can be used as values), and allow for syntactic abstraction. Not only can you quote arbitrary expressions like '(+ 1 1) and manipulate symbols directly, the macro systems available in various Lisps allow for the creation of new syntax which is one of the most useful features a programming language could have. One of Paul Graham's essays talks about "top down, bottom up" design where the "bottom up" part involves defining new syntax when patterns emerge in your problem domain that you'd like to express in a more readable and less redundant way. Lisp allows you to build the language suitable for your problem. You seem to imply that macros are bad, but I think that languages that do not offer a macro system are fundamentally limited in the problems they are suited for solving.

I by no means claim that s-expressions are a magic bullet, but I think you are biased in saying that they are inherently less readable than more complex syntaxes. There's a lot of mystique and misunderstanding around Lisp, and I hope I have cleared up a thing or two.

Can you give me an example of soft real time game that isn't hurt by the presence of a garbage collector?