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

  • From: Charlie Lobo <charlie.lobo@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:22:17 -0500

I'd also look into this newfangled OO thing people talk about.
Agents seem to be a pretty reasonable way to think of parallelism, and the
issues of a typing system that doesn't give preference to native types seems
reasonable.

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:29 AM, Paulo Pinto <pjmlp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Mostly Scala and F#, but with an eye on Haskell as well.
>
> I work on IT, and these are the languages that might eventually win the
> hearts of some programmers.
>
> Personally I would like that Scala gets ahead, specially because I am a
> Java/Python programmer by
> day.
>
> But the ML syntax has a special place on my heart, which leads me then to
> F# and Haskell, because
> my university used to have lots of classes that required the use of Caml,
> which made the syntax stick to
> my brain. Not sure if that is so positive. :)
>
> So regardless of what some people might think of Microsoft, and their
> dubious actions from time to time,
> I do appreciate the effort they are doing with F# and Haskell to make
> functional programming more mainstream.
>
> Cheers,
> Paulo
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:15 AM, Bob Pendleton <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 3:33 PM, Paulo Pinto <pjmlp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > Hi Bob,
>> >
>> > those sound really nice ideas.
>> >
>> > I tend to think that many people still live on the stone age of
>> computing by
>> > restraining themselves to C or
>> > similar languages.
>> >
>> > I rather get myself productive in a higher level language and only
>> recode in
>> > low level language like C, the
>> > application parts that really need it. Sometimes the speed of the
>> > application is good enough and no part
>> > gets rewritten.
>> >
>> > Personally I am spending my hobby programming time with functional
>> > languages, that are seeing a renaissance
>> > with the availability of multi-core.
>>
>> Interesting. Which ones? I played with several back in the early '80s.
>> And if you count Lisp among them then I was doing Lisp going back to
>> the early '70s. The fact is that most of my best ideas are stolen
>> directly from functional languages, the concept of actors, and good
>> old communicating sequential processes. The rest are based on watching
>> humans, from second graders to post docs, from newbies to seasoned
>> software engineers, trying to write code without going nuts.
>>
>> Bob Pendleton
>>
>> >
>> > Good luck for your project, you have quite a few nice ideas.
>> >
>> > Paulo
>> >
>> > On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 8:36 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 (:
>> >> 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.
>> >>> >
>> >>> > ---------------------
>> >>> > To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html
>> >>> >
>> >>> >
>> >>> >
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>> --
>> >>> +-----------------------------------------------------------
>> >>> + Bob Pendleton: writer and programmer
>> >>> + email: Bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> >>> + web: www.TheGrumpyProgrammer.com
>> >>>
>> >>> ---------------------
>> >>> To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> +-----------------------------------------------------------
>> + Bob Pendleton: writer and programmer
>> + email: Bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> + web: www.TheGrumpyProgrammer.com
>>
>> ---------------------
>> To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html
>>
>>
>>
>

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