C++ sucks for games - Other Technologies

Gerry Quinn <gerryq@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote in message news:<MPG.1bfbec8a644cb82e989ac9@news.indigo.ie>...
> In article <cf333042.0411091148.47705d22@posting.google.com>,
> kaz@ashi.footprints.net says...
> > The Lisp programmer's internal language isn't Fortran, with its
> > imperative statements, loops and variables. The internal language is
> > an empty abstract syntax tree, to which that programmer is willing to
> > assign any semantics whatsoever.
> >
> > When you think that way, then languages which don't let you encode
> > those semantics just get in your way, because you have to do the
> > translation of your internal language in your head, and then use your
> > fingers to spit out the translation. You have to do the tedious job of
> > the compiler that you are not able to write. In Lisp, you write that
> > compiler, insert it into your program, and then write in the real
> > language in which you conceived the solution. Other people then see
> > and understand your language directly, instead of having to guess at
> > it by reverse-engineering a hand-written translation.
>
> So if you asked a Fortran programmer to acquaint you with the thoughts
> of Aristotle, he would give you an English translation of his works.
> Whereas a Lisp programmer would give you the original, plus a copy of
> 'Teach Yourself Ancient Greek'.

That ****ogy would work perfectly if English lacked the expressiveness
to capture the semantics of the ancient Greek.

"John Thingstad" <john.thingstad@chello.no> writes:

> On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 20:34:23 +0100, John Thingstad
> <john.thingstad@chello.no> wrote:
>
> > Corperate market no.
> > Most desctop computer's run Windows.
> > The number is still approx 80 %.
> >
>
> I should perhaps add that this number is difficult to verify since
> many people
> overwrite the Windows that came with the machine with Linux and 40 %
> download Linux from
> the net so they are not counted. So the number of windows users is
> probably artificially high.

I would love to believe this. Certainly I have wiped Windows from a
machine and just booted Linux. Make that two machines. But I don't
think the typical user does that. I doubt that even a full percent of
Windows machines get converted to Linux or *BSD. At least not
machines that are newer than one or two years old.

I'm currently running OS X on a PowerBook G4 and Debian Linux on an
Intel box that was built from parts.

--
An ideal world is left as an excercise to the reader.
--- Paul Graham, On Lisp 8.1

David Steuber <david@david-steuber.com> writes:
> > I should perhaps add that this number is difficult to verify since
> > many people
> > overwrite the Windows that came with the machine with Linux and 40 %
> > download Linux from
> > the net so they are not counted. So the number of windows users is
> > probably artificially high.
>
> I would love to believe this. Certainly I have wiped Windows from a
> machine and just booted Linux. Make that two machines. But I don't
> think the typical user does that. I doubt that even a full percent of
> Windows machines get converted to Linux or *BSD. At least not
> machines that are newer than one or two years old.
>
> I'm currently running OS X on a PowerBook G4 and Debian Linux on an
> Intel box that was built from parts.

It doesn't matter. It's easy to have more than 50% market share when
all the OS sold by your competitors are installed on computers sold
bundled with your own. (NeXTSTEP/ix84, OPENSTEP/ix86, Solaris/ix86,
BeOS/ix86, etc). And it's best when your OS being sold and paid for
IS NOT used, since that means less support.

Either you have to buy Solaris/sparc, a Macintosh, or build yourself
your PC from parts, to avoid the Microsoft tax.


--
__Pascal Bourguignon__

In article <none-4184A0.09564811112004@news.vanderbilt.edu>,
none@vanderbilt.edu says...
> In article <MPG.1bfd63f1cff10613989adc@news.indigo.ie>,
> Gerry Quinn <gerryq@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
>
> > In article <painter-20041110175757@ram.dialup.fu-berlin.de>,
> > ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de says...
>
> > > All I saw in the gallery was a parameterized picture:
> >
> > A parametrised picture whose 'artistic' qualities are the matter at
> > issue.
>
> And this differs from the art of any abstract
> expressionist painter how?

I pointed out some quite obvious deficiencies in the work of 'AARON'
earlier. (Not when we were talking about screensavers, but when
somebody raved at me for not giving it enough respect when the reason it
was introduced in the first place was as an example Lisp's capacity for
making screensavers, not art.)

At best AARON is at the level of generating repetitive doodles. That
may well be a fine software achievement, but I do not think it is a
great artistic achievement.

> If a formal model of painting is possible, then it
> will be a parameterized function of some kind.

If the second clause is true in any interesting sense, I would consider
the above to be close to an impossibility proof for the first clause.

> The point is this guy has produced the best such
> parameterized function in existence, and he did it
> in Lisp.
>
> And this counts as evidence for C++ somehow?!

The only way it counts as evidence for C++ is in precisely the way I
stated: its functionality as a Windows screensaver is limited.

- Gerry Quinn

In article <Pine.WNT.4.53.0411111353280.968@SLINKY>, flippa@flippac.org
says...
> On Thu, 11 Nov 2004, William Bland wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 11:36:35 +0000, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> >
> > > My biggest concern (leaving pure language and re-use considerations out
> > > of it) would be easy integration with standard Windows controls and
> > > features. I would also require the creation of reasonably compact
> > > downloadable .exes that would work reliably on just about any Windows
> > > machine, and would not require downloading of added libraries or
> > > environments.
> >
> > Windows? Are you serious? Do people really still use that monstrosity?
>
> Only the vast, vast majority of home users, who're Gerry's target market.
>
> Personally I use it because I'm a gamer, and to a lesser extent because I
> can't be bothered to figure out how to duplicate my desktop setup under X.
> I do seem to make a bit more of an effort to write portable code than
> Gerry does though.

My 'Concentration' game is a bad example because everything is in a
CWnd-derived class. Such a class is already given up to Satan, and can
commit no further sin.

A more substantial game would have a 'game' object separate from the
'windows' object, and the game logic classes would be fairly portable.
[I do allow use of CPoint, CRect, etc. and CString, but even if MS
didn't have portable versions of these, I could knock up code to
replicate their functionality in a couple of days (I would rewrite all
but CString, which I would translate to <string>). Other than that, the
only MS-dependency is that it's compiled and tested only on MSVC. This
probably does introduce the odd portability hit, but I think it should
not be excessive, particularly as I tend to eschew 'fancy' code.]

- Gerry Quinn

In article <opshbf5yo6pqzri1@mjolner.upc.no>, john.thingstad@chello.no
says...
> On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 20:34:23 +0100, John Thingstad
> <john.thingstad@chello.no> wrote:
>
> > Corperate market no.
> > Most desctop computer's run Windows.
> > The number is still approx 80 %.
> >
> I should perhaps add that this number is difficult to verify since many
> people
> overwrite the Windows that came with the machine with Linux and 40 %
> download Linux from
> the net so they are not counted. So the number of windows users is
> probably artificially high.

On the other hand, it has been suggested that most who buy a PC with
only Linux installed overwrite it with a pirated version of Windows!

Anyway, I think the number of people is only one consideration. The Mac
may have no more home users than Linux, but Mac users have no
ideological hangups about buying software...

- Gerry Quinn

In article <none-B61743.09493911112004@news.vanderbilt.edu>,
none@vanderbilt.edu says...
> In article <MPG.1bfd5f21cd6f4415989ad7@news.indigo.ie>,
> Gerry Quinn <gerryq@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
>
> > But this is the thing - you go on about how Lisp is "so much more
> > productive" but there's no evidence of it!
>
> There is this website called Google where you can go
> and type things like "lisp comparison C++" and it
> lists relevant web pages and if you click on the
> links you can go to those web pages and read
> what others have said on the issue.

But they don't address the point I was making:

"The time it takes to sling together a few algorithms and produce a
basic pre-designed game is insignificant. Even if Lisp were ten times
more productive in this regard, it wouldn't make any difference. [...]
Productivity in messing around with small programs that are not for
general release is not really an advantage."

- Gerry Quinn

Gerry Quinn <gerryq@DELETETHISindigo.ie> writes:

> But they don't address the point I was making:
>
> "The time it takes to sling together a few algorithms and produce a
> basic pre-designed game is insignificant. Even if Lisp were ten times
> more productive in this regard, it wouldn't make any difference. [...]
> Productivity in messing around with small programs that are not for
> general release is not really an advantage."

What /is/ your point here? You seem to imply that Lisp doesn't have
an productivity advantage for anything larger than a small toy program.
If that's what you mean, you're wrong.
--
(espen)

In article <ktilton-B1D76C.13404711112004@nyctyp01-ge0.rdc-nyc.rr.com>,
ktilton@nyc.rr.com says...
> In article <MPG.1bfd5f21cd6f4415989ad7@news.indigo.ie>,
> Gerry Quinn <gerryq@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
> > >
> > > Argument by ****ogy! I love these!! Seriously, I checked out your web
> > > site, and I think it might be helpful to turn the challenge "Show me the
> > > Lisp game!" around: what exactly do you think Lisp might not be able to
> > > handle in writing such games? The logic? The graphics? The GUI?
> > > Performance? Other?
> >
> > My biggest concern (leaving pure language and re-use considerations out
> > of it) would be easy integration with standard Windows controls and
> > features.
>
> Will the C interface do? Can do. Corman Lisp offers a nice set of
> bindings so you Just Call windows API as if it were in Lisp. Same with
> AllegroCL.

No, it will not! MFC has its faults, but it is better than the Windows
API. Plus, you are now selling a mixture of Lisp and C, versus pure
C++. People talk about 'multi-language' programs, with the optimal
language used for each task, but I suspect this is making a virtue out
of necessity, except on very big projects...

> I gather MS is moving to C++-only deals, which gets ugly since one needs
> to develop C glue.

I doubt that will be an issue, at least for a long time - at worst there
will be a transparent compatibility mode for programs that call the old
API functions. Observe that 16-bit Windows software still works fine
for the most part.

> > I would also require the creation of reasonably compact
> > downloadable .exes that would work reliably on just about any Windows
> > machine, and would not require downloading of added libraries or
> > environments.
>
> By compact you mean "will fit on a CD"? Can do.

No I don't. Bandwidth is much cheaper than it used to be, but one
cannot blithely create demos that are tens of MB in size. A MB or two
overhead would be fine, so long as the installation can be made
transparent.

> Agreed. I take it back. Lisp is like a Formula I racer (yeah!!
> ****ogies!!). It does not pay off (much) until you have some interesting
> driving to do. Concentration and, from what I can see, your games are
> too simple to exercise a language. Not that they are bad games!
>
> I was going to port Michael's version to Cells (my FRP hack) when I
> realized it would have about three rules. Yawn. I do not need VisiCalc
> to buy a six-pack of Bud and some pretzels.

Still, it only took us a couple of hours in Lisp and C++. You've a
captive audience of Lisp fans on this thread - maybe it would be
worthwhile! Actually (funny how these things grow on you) I was toying
with the idea of doing a 2-player Windows version - I think I worked out
an easy way to implement a realistic AI...

> > Call it prejudice if you like, but I *trust* C++, like C before it, to
> > not fail in this regard. Even for apps much much bigger than mine.
>
> Well, no, the last bit is exactly the issue, and has not been
> established by the Concentration shoot-out.
>
> I propose we all toss off an air traffic control system, one in C++, one
> in Lisp, and one in Lisp/Cells, then see. We'll have Michael go first
> again.

That seems wisest!

- Gerry Quinn