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John Carmack: Thoughts on Haskell [video]

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Re: John Carmack: Thoughts on Haskell [video]

#41

Post by DanWaterworth »

ExpiredLink wrote: post #33
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laugh as you might, but this is the interface of Datomic, the database system by Rich Hickey, the creator of Clojure. To perform a query, you connect to a database and request the present state of the database. This is an immutable representation of the database at that point in time, and you can query it however you like, or even hold on to it forever. Of course, the database isn't actually fully copied.

> Of course, the database isn't actually fully copied. You mean, Hickey just fakes it? Now I'm deeply disappointed.

No, it's not faking it. From what I understand it's copied lazily.

Re: John Carmack: Thoughts on Haskell [video]

#42

Post by groovy2shoes »

TylerE wrote: post #29
SilasX wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the level of source code logic it appears to be copying and returning a new data structure. That doesn't mean the compiled, optimized code is performing all the copies that the the program appears to be doing. Pure FP = don't mutate variables in the program. Of course the actual implementation can reuse memory blocks or else pure FPers would have to keep buying new memory!

Pure FP doesn't have variables. It has bindings.

Function parameters are variables even in pure FP. If your definition of variable requires assignment, then even mathematics doesn't have variables.

Re: John Carmack: Thoughts on Haskell [video]

#43

Post by aryastark »

agentultra wrote: post #30

AFAICT he doesn't reach any particularly satisfying conclusions and just speculates that Haskell is an interesting avenue of research that may bear fruit for game development. It doesn't seem like he has put the same amount of effort in experimenting with Lisp. He doesn't mention any attempt to port Wolfenstein over to Common Lisp. Instead he seems content speculating from the same position many Lisp doubters have af…

I can't watch his talk right now, but at QuakeCon he recently discussed Scheme, and the potential for embedding it in a game. I think he also pondered what Quake would have been if QuakeC was based on Scheme instead.

But my basic issue with talking about Carmack with respect to programming languages is that he never struck me as an expert on languages. Or even programming for that matter. The source code to Quake was on the messy side of things. His rationale for switching to C++ always seemed a little on the thin side of things, and seemed more like industry pressure than anything. He's great on concepts, on graphics, and keeping up with OpenGL and whatever NVidia/ATI are doing. But he's just now coming around to Scheme and Haskell. I don't really think his perspective on languages carries that much weight to be honest. But I'll listen to him talk about it anytime.

Re: John Carmack: Thoughts on Haskell [video]

#44

Post by binarycrusader »

kybernetyk wrote: post #4

I'm still waiting for his in depth article about his experiences while porting Wolfenstein to Haskell - mainly to see if it's worth learning Haskell. Beacause as he said in the video: Most examples in books (I guess that counts for evangelization blogs too) are toy examples. And I'd like to know how viable the language is for bigger systems.

This is where I'm at with Go.

Go seems to have been used in lots of networking-related scenarios, but I have yet to see either a major graphical application or even well-known open source game written in it yet.

I would love to see what the architecture of a 3D renderer looks like in Go, as an example.

Like you, I also share the same interest with Haskell.

Re: John Carmack: Thoughts on Haskell [video]

#46

Post by robrenaud »

aryastark wrote: post #43
agentultra wrote: post #30

AFAICT he doesn't reach any particularly satisfying conclusions and just speculates that Haskell is an interesting avenue of research that may bear fruit for game development. It doesn't seem like he has put the same amount of effort in experimenting with Lisp. He doesn't mention any attempt to port Wolfenstein over to Common Lisp. Instead he seems content speculating from the same position many Lisp doubters have af…

I can't watch his talk right now, but at QuakeCon he recently discussed Scheme, and the potential for embedding it in a game. I think he also pondered what Quake would have been if QuakeC was based on Scheme instead. But my basic issue with talking about Carmack with respect to programming languages is that he never struck me as an expert on languages. Or even programming for that matter. The source code to Quake was…

To me, that is a great reason to listen to him.

He builds big and complicated programs that people actually use.

Re: John Carmack: Thoughts on Haskell [video]

#47

Post by bdg »

kybernetyk wrote: post #4

I'm still waiting for his in depth article about his experiences while porting Wolfenstein to Haskell - mainly to see if it's worth learning Haskell. Beacause as he said in the video: Most examples in books (I guess that counts for evangelization blogs too) are toy examples. And I'd like to know how viable the language is for bigger systems.

I've been using the xmonad window manager, which is roughly 1000 lines. While not a vastly complex system, it's non-trivial, especially solving things like gui interaction in a side-effect free world. I believe they had to use some sort of zipper structure for the mouse detection to overcome things that are easy in other languages.

Re: John Carmack: Thoughts on Haskell [video]

#48

Post by sfvisser »

bad_user wrote: post #38
agentultra wrote: post #30

AFAICT he doesn't reach any particularly satisfying conclusions and just speculates that Haskell is an interesting avenue of research that may bear fruit for game development. It doesn't seem like he has put the same amount of effort in experimenting with Lisp. He doesn't mention any attempt to port Wolfenstein over to Common Lisp. Instead he seems content speculating from the same position many Lisp doubters have af…

If you'll go read his opinions, you'll see that he has been a strong advocate for static analysis. His position is very understandable since he spent a lot of time working on complex pieces of C/C++ code, encountering a lot of subtle accidental errors that could have been avoided with better tools for static analysis or with a better language. He also worked mostly on client side software, where the fail fast / fail…

> ...I don't see myself using much Haskell precisely because its tools for modularity seem limited.

> Dynamic languages are naturally more modular

Why is that? I'm pretty convinced pure and especially lazy languages allow for great modularity.

See http://augustss.blogspot.nl/2011/05/more-points-for-lazy-eva... for an interesting view on this.

Re: John Carmack: Thoughts on Haskell [video]

#49

Post by agumonkey »

agentultra wrote: post #30

AFAICT he doesn't reach any particularly satisfying conclusions and just speculates that Haskell is an interesting avenue of research that may bear fruit for game development. It doesn't seem like he has put the same amount of effort in experimenting with Lisp. He doesn't mention any attempt to port Wolfenstein over to Common Lisp. Instead he seems content speculating from the same position many Lisp doubters have af…

Already mentioned in previous threads, but Tim Sweeney (Epic Games), who made a long presentations about the benefits of FP around 2006, is presenting a paper about a formalism related to dependent typing http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4791

Re: John Carmack: Thoughts on Haskell [video]

#50

Post by anaphor »

bdg wrote: post #47
kybernetyk wrote: post #4

I'm still waiting for his in depth article about his experiences while porting Wolfenstein to Haskell - mainly to see if it's worth learning Haskell. Beacause as he said in the video: Most examples in books (I guess that counts for evangelization blogs too) are toy examples. And I'd like to know how viable the language is for bigger systems.

I've been using the xmonad window manager, which is roughly 1000 lines. While not a vastly complex system, it's non-trivial, especially solving things like gui interaction in a side-effect free world. I believe they had to use some sort of zipper structure for the mouse detection to overcome things that are easy in other languages.

I wouldn't say zippers are really "overcoming" anything, they're very nice and elegant data structures, particularly because any data type has an associated zipper form.
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