John Carmack: Thoughts on Haskell [video]

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 2:11 AM UTC

Aqueous wrote: post #63

pohl wrote: post #36

I like this quotation: Languages talk about being multi-paradigm as if it's a good thing, but multi-paradigm means you can always do the bad thing if you feel you really need to, and programmers are extremely bad at doing sort of the the time-scale integration of the cost of doing something that they know is negative. I mean everyone will know...it's like "this global flag: this is not a good thing, this a bad thing…

While i can see his point, I'm not entirely sure this is the case. A text-book example of a multi-paradigm language is Scala. And yet with Scala, the more I've learned about the functional side of things, the more tempting it is just to avoid any imperative or object-oriented idioms or patterns and just go functional all the way. it's almost as if the designers of scala knew if they could convert java programmers ove…

Post by TylerE » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 2:25 AM UTC

marssaxman wrote: post #68

TylerE wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This seems like splitting hairs.

Post by hristov » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 3:07 AM UTC

thirsteh wrote: post #8

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 highly anecdotal, but I've built and been part of very practical/non-theoretical, large Haskell projects (100k+ lines, which is a lot for Haskell). The only big complaint I have is that it's somewhat hard to do loose coupling, i.e. for something somewhere to reference a type without either redeclaring the type (when that's possible), or having a huge, centralized Types.hs that declares all the types that are…

Post by sseveran » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 4:53 AM UTC

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…

Post by sseveran » Tue, Aug 27, 2013, 5:00 AM UTC

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…