Some technical comments (I think the rest of the article is pretty
good on it's own merits (that is, disregarding all the flame-wars
going on right now)):
"Lisp, on the other hand, doesn't need an interpreter. It can just run
Lisp code that is stored on the disk (and even compile it at load time
for more speed)."
Well, Lisp can also compile code into binary files too. One thing you
should also mention is that the structure of most Lisp runtimes
permits them to dump the entire application memory image to disk very
quickly. Depending on how large the image is and what portion of it is
static, this may be a good way to do save games (at least on systems
with hard-drives).
I think Lisp's dynamism and malleability is the one thing that not
even Greenspun's Tenth can provide an ersatz for. Shiro Kawai wrote an
excellent pair of articles on how Lisp and Allegrostore were used for
production tracking at Square films that made an impression on me
(change-class totally kicks ass), and that I think are relevant to the
more general problem of game production pipelines as well:
http://www.lava.net/~shiro/Private/essay/gdc2002.html
http://www.shiro.dreamhost.com/scheme/docs/jlugm2000.html
Then of course you shouldn't knock Lisp for numerical computations
either until you've read about the Supercomputer Toolkit project at
MIT and HP:
ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-1329.pdf
I think Lisp numerical mini-languages such as the one used in the
Toolkit can be a very big win over C++ in terms of performance,
especially on vectored processors. It almost pains me to think of all
the effort wasted on trying to squeeze out parallelism from for loops
by vectorizing C compilers.
Vladimir
Vladimir Sedach <(string-downcase (concatenate 'string last-name (subseq first-name 0 1)))@cpsc.ucalgary.ca> wrote in message news:<··············@shawnews.cg.shawcable.net>...
> I think Lisp's dynamism and malleability is the one thing that not
> even Greenspun's Tenth can provide an ersatz for. Shiro Kawai wrote an
> excellent pair of articles on how Lisp and Allegrostore were used for
> production tracking at Square films that made an impression on me
> (change-class totally kicks ass), and that I think are relevant to the
> more general problem of game production pipelines as well:
> http://www.lava.net/~shiro/Private/essay/gdc2002.html
> http://www.shiro.dreamhost.com/scheme/docs/jlugm2000.html
FYI, this one may also be relevant to the current topic.
http://www.shiro.dreamhost.com/scheme/docs/ILC2002.html
We ran Scheme on PS2 architecture.