I like this quotation:<p><i>Languages talk about being multi-paradigm as if it's a good thing, but multi-paradigm means you can always do the bad thing if you feel you really need to, and programmers are extremely bad at doing sort of the the time-scale integration of the cost of doing something that they know is negative. I mean everyone will know...it's like "this global flag: this is not a good thing, this a bad thing - but it's only a little bad thing" and they don't think about how, you know, the next five years how many times that little bad thing is going to effect things. So brutal purity: you have no choice.</i><p>In particular, I like the bit about integrating your technical debt function with respect to time, over the time you have to live with the debt, and how bad programmers are at thinking in those terms. We tend to think about how much technical debt we have at a given fixed point in time, but the area under the curve is what bites you.
I'm still waiting for his in depth article about his experiences while porting Wolfenstein to Haskell - mainly to see if it's worth learning Haskell. Beacause as he said in the video: Most examples in books (I guess that counts for evangelization blogs too) are toy examples. And I'd like to know how viable the language is for bigger systems.
> <i>Error establishing a database connection</i><p>Diabolic, stateful database connections blocking a Haskell treatise! They should have copied the database on each request instead.
AFAICT he doesn't reach any particularly satisfying conclusions and just speculates that Haskell is an interesting avenue of research that may bear fruit for game development.<p>It doesn't seem like he has put the same amount of effort in experimenting with Lisp. He doesn't mention any attempt to port Wolfenstein over to Common Lisp. Instead he seems content speculating from the same position many Lisp doubters have after reading a few books and working on some exercises (which is ironic considering his impetus for the Haskell project). I hope he gave Lisp the same treatment as Haskell before he drew any conclusions but it doesn't seem like he has from this speech.<p>Lisp for game development could be an interesting avenue (and has precedent in AAA console development). The dynamic vs. static argument isn't the interesting feature. Personally I think the symbolic model of computation is far more compelling. I've read posts by programmers who've written a high-level language for writing financial trading algorithms in Common Lisp that compile down to optimized VHDL for running on FPGAs. Sure you don't have a static analyzer to tell you you've done something wrong before you run your programs but I've rarely seen that becoming an issue in practice at that level. There are plenty of Common Lisp libraries that have been around for a long time that don't require much maintenance which makes me wonder where this belief that dynamic languages don't produce solid, maintainable code comes from.<p>In my rather limited experience I find the over-specification required by statically typed language to be a impedance to writing robust, compose-able software (at least it's much more difficult and tends to lead to Greenspunning if you try to go that route).<p>Either way... a very interesting talk and it's cool to hear that he's experimenting with this stuff. Carmack is in a rare position to have such a breadth of experience and deep technical knowledge that even just messing around with this stuff might make waves throughout the industry.
Here's the video: <a href="http://youtu.be/1PhArSujR_A" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/1PhArSujR_A</a> (the text on the page just introduces Carmack)
Google cache: <a href="http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:functionaltalks.org/2013/08/26/john-carmack-thoughts-on-haskell/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:functionaltalks.org/2013...</a><p>The article is essentially just a link to the fourth part of his keynote at Quakecon ( <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A</a> )