John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language

Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by TeMPOraL on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @06:28PM (#9815690)

This is simply the case of getting used to something. The Lisp code reads like this: (define A B) -> define A to be B. You define (square x) to mean (* x x). It requires you to know only one syntax rule - that (f a b ...) means "apply f to arguments a, b, ...". The above code basically reads "define applying square to x to mean applying * to x and x".

> They are also both array programming languages which is a rather odd niche.

Array programming may seem like an odd niche if the only thing one knows is web development, but the moment you actually start doing some maths, they become incredibly useful. Another, much more popular (and crappier, which seems to be a common correlation, but that's a different story) array programming language is MATLAB. Also you've probably heard of R, loved in statistics and sciences, which is another array language.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by ahoge on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @08:06PM (#9816114)

> This is simply the case of getting used to something.

My point was that other languages provide more visual hooks. Lisp is just words and parens. Nothing sticks out. Everything is the same.

So, you can't learn this "visual vocabulary" because there simply isn't any. There is a thing at the beginning of each list and what follows are the parameters. That's it.

"(define x 5)", "(square x)", and "(+ x x)" are syntactically the same thing.

> Array programming may seem like an odd niche if the only thing one knows is web development

You make it sound like it's either web stuff or maths.

Array programming languages aren't used for scripting (e.g. games), are they?

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by TeMPOraL on Thursday July 02, 2015 @05:27AM (#9817728)

How many of those visual hooks are provided by syntax highlighting? You have that in Lisp as well. Moreover, you don't need that many syntax hooks; you learn to recognize words, just like when reading a book, and also indentation structure.

> Array programming languages aren't used for scripting (e.g. games), are they?

They've been used at least once, if you count one demo and one game I wrote in MATLAB. Man, you wouldn't believe how convenient array languages are when you need to do, things like polygon mesh interpolation (morphing), not to mention actual array operations like multiplying matrices or vectors. MATLAB may be a crappy language, but the array operations? I wish I had them in C++/Java for games.

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Re:John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language by GFK_of_xmaspast on Thursday July 02, 2015 @02:44PM (#9820771)

If you interpret "array programming language" as "language with support for arrays and matrices as first-class objects with nice operators, etc" then you get a lot more things coming into the mix beyond oddballs like apl.

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