Naughty Dog used an internally developed programming language for the whole game (or at least most of it.) A big part of the appeal was apparently the dynamic nature of Lisps, which allowed reloading of code at runtime to simplify debugging. This article is a postmortem about Jak and Daxter; the next page also mentions the drawbacks of using GOAL, as well:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2985/postmortem_naught...
You get that message fairly often because the implementation uses continuations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation). This is one functional style for making a stateless protocol (HTTP) into a stateful one. HN could use a different design (one with less state) and avoid these issues with a few different trade-offs. This is an implementation detail rather than something specific to FP vs. non-FP. Also, best I can tell, HN still stores all of its data in flat files rather than a traditional datastore.
Re:Advanced programming languages
by wahnfrieden on Monday January 09, 2012 @10:09PM
(#3445453)
I appreciate your interesting comments, but just FYI, it's "a lot" not "allot". I wouldn't normally point out a spelling error but I noticed it enough to be distracting and thought you might not know (in case of ESL).
> I wonder if the lack of state is why I keep getting the "Unknown or expired link" message all the time?
As front page keeps changing and reordering, the "Next page" link after some time becomes meaningless, so maybe it's because of that.
I see allot of functional DSLs (Excel for example + autocad as you pointed out).
Was crash bandicoot written in Lisp or was this just an internal DSL used for certain operations?
I don't have anything against functional languages and I'm sure all good developers should know at least 1 but the article seems to suggest that everyone should use them all the time.
There are more important things than having an expressive language, I use allot of Java which is seriously non expressive in many ways but I have more confidence in it to solve the category of problems I deal with than any other language that I have tried thus far.