[LispSea] presentation requests

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Jeff Wood wrote:
> My response would be to look @ the game developer article on Naughty
> Dog ( a game production company that was purchased by Sony ... if I'm
> remembering correctly ) ... they used a LOT of lisp in their internal
> stuff ... made for some great games ... made them good enough they got
> bought ... and of course, then their technology was too much and got
> killed by the parent company ...
>

I'm quite aware of Naughty Dog.  It's not really that interesting to me 
as a presentation though, unless someone has a way of obtaining someone 
from Naughty Dog that did the GOAL code.  Dog and pony of open source 
Lisp games is potentially more interesting because people can download 
and play with it.  Granted there aren't any great Lisp games out there.  
Stratagus was previously one of the better ones; it began life as 
Freecraft, a Warcraft clone.  But in the transition to Stratagus, the 
new hands on board dumped the Scheme interpreter.  See, this is a 
pattern.  I'm not eager to do any kind of presentation about Naughty Dog 
unless there's a principal to give it.  Any secondhand presentation ends 
with "Well, uh, and they dumped Lisp in favor of the same old crud."  
Depressing.


>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp
>
> ... I agree it's not something that everybody can play with right now
> ... but it does show that people are doing *something* with it ...
> and are willing to invest in good ideas ...

What it proves, is that if you're making an expensive mainstream title, 
you can pay someone to sit around and invent their own programming 
language.  Then it'll turn out that that guy had fun making his career 
at the partial expense of the product he was working on.  The subsequent 
team that comes in, has no investment in the newfangled code and dumps 
it.  It is a very bad model for sustainable Lisp development.  Hmm, yet 
more reason to stick to my guns about developing a 3D Scheme engine from 
scratch.  If the core technology is not Scheme, if it is just an 
embedded language, then the embedded language will be replaced by 
whatever else becomes au courrant.  Even if Scheme is really easy to 
embed, and makes headway on new projects in that manner, I think without 
a "major anchor" it just drifts away into the ocean of scripting languages.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every