I guess we all had that FP click at some point in our lives, but then we got back to our regular (imperative) flow, hopefully as better engineers :)
John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]
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Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]
#12Interesting that he ran into friction exactly where you would expect him to. He was talking about having the AI scripts running in different purely functional threads. Later (around 21 minutes in) he mentions what happens when two AIs decide to move to the same place at the same time, and has not figured out the solution. Of course parallel programming is easy if you ignore the data dependencies, but eventually you r…
He talked about a whole FP-powered architecture to solve this.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]
#13EDIT: Why all those downvotes? Are famous developers not supposed to criticized on HN? While John has a lot of interesting things to say, the presentation is awful, almost an imposition to the audience. There's not a single slide, or any repetition to clarify structure, or any notable gestures to make up for that. A simple overview, just a damn simple list of keywords, would already go a long way. That would add a lo…
This was a keynote at a Quakecon, a conference for game players, not a technical presentation for software developers.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]
#14I guess we all had that FP click at some point in our lives, but then we got back to our regular (imperative) flow, hopefully as better engineers :)
I got that FP click, switch to Clojure, and pretty happy with that move 7 years later. :)
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]
#15Interesting that he ran into friction exactly where you would expect him to. He was talking about having the AI scripts running in different purely functional threads. Later (around 21 minutes in) he mentions what happens when two AIs decide to move to the same place at the same time, and has not figured out the solution. Of course parallel programming is easy if you ignore the data dependencies, but eventually you r…
He talked about a whole FP-powered architecture to solve this.
Motivated reasoning. He prefers imperative programming (or something other than functional programming), so he hears the "criticism" without hearing the solution. I mean, of course he physically hears both, but one is prominent in his consciousness. It doesn't matter that there is a solution, he heard what he needed to hear to get the evidence he needs to maintain his bias, and shuts off his frontal lobe.
To be clear: Everyone does this. I just think it's interesting.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]
#16He wrote a very good piece here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional... on the same topic (is it in fact the same?)
I come back to this quote over and over when talking about desktop and mobile apps/games, especially since they tend to be highly state driven view collections and devs are always trying to come up with DRY patterns to bury important features in subclasses or helper utils.
> A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
He talked about a whole FP-powered architecture to solve this.
Motivated reasoning. He prefers imperative programming (or something other than functional programming), so he hears the "criticism" without hearing the solution. I mean, of course he physically hears both, but one is prominent in his consciousness. It doesn't matter that there is a solution, he heard what he needed to hear to get the evidence he needs to maintain his bias, and shuts off his frontal lobe. To be clear…
You can train yourself to recognize this pattern in your own behavior.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]
#18TL;DR Famous game developer take an hour here and there and "makes himself" do "some stuff" in Haskell, looks back through some old code on another project that was written in a functional style and forgotten about; forgetting all the other working code that was forgotten about because FP is being discussed so why not and declares that FP is really good.
Haskell disciples on HN dig out this video which mentions FP among other unrelated topics and post it on HN as the definitive reason why all other programming methods should be abandoned in favor of FP, _because Carmack_.
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]
#19Has there been any progress on garbage collection since then?
He discusses GC in games starting here: https://youtu.be/1PhArSujR_A?t=1443
Re: John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]
#20TL;DR Famous game developer take an hour here and there and "makes himself" do "some stuff" in Haskell, looks back through some old code on another project that was written in a functional style and forgotten about; forgetting all the other working code that was forgotten about because FP is being discussed so why not and declares that FP is really good. Haskell disciples on HN dig out this video which mentions FP am…
Community cynic gets meta in sarcastic tone, not realizing it's undermining discourse, not contributing to. Outcome generally being that community cynic can carry around "I'm so smart" feeling all day.