[gameprogrammer] Re: Daydreaming, questioning....

  • From: Bob Pendleton <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:11:42 -0500

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 1:36 PM, Alan Wolfe <alan.wolfe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> "First off, the majority of languages (I almost said *all* but I do not
> know *all* languages) were designed around the idea that resources are
> scarce"
>
> "I want message passing and
> multithreading to be so intrinsic in the language that you get them
> without even thinking about it."
>
> Honestly i was thinking "great, yet another language!" when i started
> reading but your ideas are interesting and i think there's some good
> potential here (:

To start out trying to do a new language that is worth doing takes
either a huge amount of arrogance or an astonishing level of naiveté.
Since I know that, I often wonder what I'm thinking to even consider
doing. I guess the only other reason is because it will be fun and
maybe it will actually be of use.

Bob Pendleton

> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Bob Pendleton <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks to everybody who replied. I haven't replied because I figured I
>> needed some time to let my fevered imaginings simmer down.
>>
>> I'm going with the language #4 plus muxing in some of #5.
>>
>> A bunch of you expressed interest in helping with the stonewolf
>> programming language. So, I'm going to post my thoughts on the subject
>> here and see what you folks think about what I want to do.
>>
>> First off, what am I thinking about, why do I think we need a new
>> language? There are lots of reasons. Most of them are outside of what
>> is IMHO the "normal" way of looking at programming languages.
>>
>> First off, the majority of languages (I almost said *all* but I do not
>> know *all* languages) were designed around the idea that resources are
>> scarce. Think about C and C++. C was designed in the '72 and C++ was
>> designed starting in '79. In '79 I bought 16 kilobytes of ram for my 2
>> megahertz z80 for $110 which is $327 in 2009 dollars. In '72 I could
>> not afford to buy 16KB of ram. It was too expensive.
>>
>> OTOH, a little over a month ago I bought 4 gigabytes of RAM for $50.
>> That 2009 $50 has the same buying power as $9.68 in '72 and $16.82 in
>> '79 (we had a lot of inflation during the '70s).
>>
>> What is my point? Those two languages were designed when a megabyte
>> was a *huge* amount of memory. In the '70s the hacker slang for a
>> megabyte of RAM was "moby" as in the great white whale. The basic
>> assumption forced on language designers was that memory was scarce and
>> expensive. The same goes for processors. My aging AMD 64 dual core
>> processor has more computing power than was available from all the
>> computers on my university campus combined. The computer graphics chip
>> on my mother board was literally science fiction in the '70s. Top of
>> the line multimillion dollar graphic displays were used in the 1982
>> movie "Wrath of Kahn". Right now you can get better graphics
>> technology for $10 in the discount bin at Goodwill.
>>
>> Another scarcity assumption drove the complete separation of
>> C/C++/Java from their libraries. C was designed for embedded systems,
>> telephone switches, where you could not assume that you would have a
>> keyboard, or a disk, so all I/O was removed from the language. The
>> same happened for things like the math library. In the bad old days
>> only expensive mainframes (multimillion dollar machines) had floating
>> point hardware. Even some of the biggest supercomputers didn't have a
>> hardware floating point divider. You kept as much out of the language
>> as possible because a runtime library couldn't add more than a few
>> kilobytes to user programs if you expected the programs to fit in
>> memory. Now days I can have hundreds of megabytes of runtime library
>> and it won't affect my ability to run a program. In the future I can
>> have a multigigabyte runtime and not worry about it at all.
>>
>> Even though languages like Java and C# were designed much later they
>> carry forward a bunch of the assumptions of scarcity found in older
>> languages like C and C++.
>>
>> The result of these assumptions is that programmers have to spend a
>> great deal of time worrying about things like "does the interface use
>> and int16 or an int32?". Why should I have to do that? Why not just be
>> able to use a "number"? Why should I care how it is represented? I
>> want to break all the assumptions I see built into these languages.
>> Why did I have to write my net2 library? Why shouldn't a modern
>> language just support asynchronous network IO the way it supports
>> doing a floating point divide?
>>
>> Ok, a bunch of you just went Huh? what about efficiency? Well the way
>> I see it is we will have at least two levels of programming going on.
>> Just like we currently do with game engines. One level of programming
>> worries about making things super efficient so the game runs fast
>> enough, these are the engine programmers. The other level are the so
>> called scripters. These are people who actually write the game but
>> they do it in a language like Lua or Python that is embedded in the
>> game engine. The scripters don't have to worry so much about the
>> efficiency of their code because it is all written to use highly
>> efficient code that already exists. If the scripters need a new
>> feature they don't usually write it in the scripting language, they
>> get someone else to write it in a language like C++ and add it as an
>> interface that they can use.
>>
>> One way to think of it is to think of a language with all the parts
>> (and much more) of a game engine built into the language rather than
>> having a language built into a game engine. I really want a lot more
>> than that.
>>
>> What I want is a language that is designed to make use of massive
>> amounts of memory and hundreds or thousands of hardware threads that
>> contains all the libraries I am likely to ever need and the ability to
>> easily integrate libraries I didn't imagine I would ever need.
>>
>> Yeah, but what about efficiency? Let's define language efficiency as
>> the amount of your life you have to spend to write a program a
>> complete program. Or, as the ratio of the number of programs you can
>> write in a year using different languages. If I can write one major
>> program a year in C, and 1.5 per year in C++ then I want to be able to
>> write 10 in Stonewolf. Which would make Stonewolf 10 times more
>> efficient in terms of my life span than C. (BTW, if Stonewolf actually
>> lets me get to 3 I would consider it a wonderful achievement.)
>>
>> I also want to get as far away from C based syntax as I can without
>> creating something worse. I want control structures that can be
>> automatically converted into high level parallel code. I want to make
>> executable code a true full fledged data type so it is easy to
>> replicate it across a "cloud" and to make it part of a class in a
>> database. I want unicode to be built in from the beginning and not
>> tacked on as an after thought. I want message passing and
>> multithreading to be so intrinsic in the language that you get them
>> without even thinking about it.
>>
>> So, that is what I want, what do you think?
>>
>> Ok, I thought I would start out with a fevered rant and see what kind
>> of a reaction I get. I have actually been writing a speculative
>> specification in fits and starts for 5 or 6 years. I'm holding off on
>> posting any of that because I want to get other people thinking about
>> all this without tainting your imaginations.
>>
>> Currently I'm messing around with what I call plumbing code just
>> trying to see what I can do to make it fit into a Unicode world. I
>> haven't found a suitable parser generator, I'm real picky about error
>> reporting and recovery, so I'm planning to just do a hand coded
>> recursive descent parser. And, I'm committed to using C++ as the
>> implementation language. Lots of good reasons for using C++. The best
>> one being that C++ makes a great extension language for Stonewolf.
>>
>> Bob Pendleton
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 1:36 PM, Sami Näätänen <sn.ml@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> wrote:
>> > On Thursday 17 September 2009 20:00:59 Bob Pendleton wrote:
>> >> Ok, so I'm sitting here thinking about what I am going to work on
>> >> next. Right now I am finishing up work on atomic ops for SDL 1.3 and I
>> >> have promised to work on multiple device handling for SDL 1.3 on
>> >> Linux. (it is sort of messed up right now.) But, that won't take a lot
>> >> of time, I hope, so I'm thinking about new projects. So, I thought I
>> >> would ask what you folks thought about some ideas and see if maybe
>> >> y'all could make some suggestions?
>> >>
>> >> In no particular order....
>> >>
>> >> 1) Write the space war game I always wanted to write. Yeah, that one,
>> >> or is it three? No, I think there are least 20 games in that bag.
>> >>
>> >> 2) Write yet another 3D drawing/layout program. This would be the kind
>> >> of program you need for drawing 3D items and doing level layout and
>> >> design. Trouble is there are a million of these. Reason for doing it:
>> >> I've never seen one that took less than *months* to learn to use. Or,
>> >> they only run on Windows or Mac so I've never tried them :-).
>> >>
>> >> 3) Build a planet sim so you can create game worlds without having to
>> >> do it by hand. This one popped out while I was thinking about #1. I
>> >> spent a lot of time learning just how hard it is to subdivide a
>> >> sphere. Spheres are really nasty.
>> >>
>> >> 4) Stonewolf, the programming language:  I have started at least 8
>> >> times to develop a language designed for multimedia apps whose design
>> >> is aimed at the future, not the past. Designed for 64 bit address
>> >> spaces, terabyte disks, and hundreds of cores. I have settled on the
>> >> name, Stonewolf. Two things that a language needs are a cool name and
>> >> a developer with a beard. Seriously, look it up. All the cool
>> >> languages were developed by people with beards. The name is important
>> >> too. Consider that three of the greatest languages in the history of
>> >> computing, Lisp, Scheme, and Smalltalk, were all pretty much killed by
>> >> their names. No real programmer wants to spend all day lisping,
>> >> scheming, or making smalltalk.
>> >>
>> >> 5) Spend the time meditating, reading sutras, and practicing Kung Fu.
>> >> At least I would feel a lot better :-)
>> >>
>> >> Except for #5, I would, of course, blog writing and otherwise make
>> >> lots of noise about what I was doing.
>> >>
>> >> Comments? Flames?
>> >
>> > Well I would do 4th first.
>> > Then use it to do 1st and give the first try for the language (As a
>> > proof that
>> > it is complete).
>> > Now it is time to do the 2nd and 3th in parallel using Stonewolf of
>> > course.
>> >
>> > Oh and mux some 5 to the whole period to balance everything.
>> >
>> > PS. I would like to help as much as I can manage in that language design
>> > and
>> > development.
>> >
>> > ---------------------
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>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> +-----------------------------------------------------------
>> + Bob Pendleton: writer and programmer
>> + email: Bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> + web: www.TheGrumpyProgrammer.com
>>
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>>
>>
>
>



-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------
+ Bob Pendleton: writer and programmer
+ email: Bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
+ web: www.TheGrumpyProgrammer.com

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