John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language

Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by davedx on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @05:14AM (#9810761)

I've worked at a couple of games companies and we didn't use Lua on any of the projects I worked on. One was starting to experiment with it when I left.

A large AAA studio I worked at actually rolled their own scripting language, compiler, and VM from scratch. I got to get my hands dirty with this. The only time since University I've had to utilise my compilers knowledge :)

Unity gives you the choice of C#, a JavaScript dialect, or a Python dialect.

Why not lisp? :D

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by mijoharas on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @10:09AM (#9811882)

Andy Gavin has a great series of articles on the making of crash bandicoot[0], [1]. (I'd recommend reading the entire series as it's very interesting).

It seems that in order to create an immersive world on the original playstation and keep up the speed of development, iteration and dynamism required for a game he wrote his own compiler (into assembly for the playstation one) for a lisp that he created called Game Oriented Object Lisp (GOOL)[1].

[0] http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-ban...

[1] http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/video-games/making-crash/

[2] http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ban...

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by viach on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @05:26AM (#9810800)

Because, in my opinion, when you create a tool for the masses, the individual preferences should be the last in line of factors when you choose scripting programming language for that.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by andrewchambers on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @05:30AM (#9810814)

God forbid javascript developers are being encouraged to broaden their horizons by a master of the discipline.

He is going to be forced to add javascript by whiners anyway, I am enjoying the pipe dream of keeping it away.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by TeMPOraL on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @06:35AM (#9811008)

When you create a tool for the masses, you get a crap tool. You should focus on creating a good tool first; the masses will have to follow anyway.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by pmelendez on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @07:13AM (#9811106)

> when you create a tool for the masses, the individual preferences should be the last in line

Well Javascript is Javascript because of some guy personal prefences at Netscape. The same is true for C# and Java in their respective companies, and they didn't start as popular languages either.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by toyg on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @08:17AM (#9811332)

Javascript is literally the poster child for "accidental and completely illogical success". It's the only mainstream language that did not have to compete with anything else because of accidents of history.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by rprospero on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:06AM (#9811549)

Technically, it did have to compete with VBScript, back when IE had browser dominance and VBScript support.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by toyg on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:16AM (#9811584)

But Netscape never had support for vbscript, so until they died Javascript/JScript was the only choice. By the time IE reached dominance, the industry had already standardized on JS.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by TeMPOraL on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:38AM (#9811671)

JavaScript was supposed to be Scheme not once but twice, and the reason we use it instead of a Lisp in the browser is the insane competition with Microsoft. Source: interviews in Coders at Work.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by DennisP on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @09:34AM (#9811654)

And that guy wanted to just use Scheme, but got overruled by management.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by greydius on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @08:00AM (#9811268)

By that line of reasoning, everything would be COBOL.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by nikki93 on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @04:56PM (#9815097)

They masses don't know what they want. By choosing for them, you show them.

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