Peter Ashford said:
The issue I see going forward is this - to be commercially successful
at making middleware, there need to be people buying your product,
which requires a market of Lisp game programmers. There doesn't
currently exist such a market, therefore good Lisp middleware is not
going to be written.
To create this market, there needs to be a bunch of Lisp trailblazers
-
the equivallent of companies like Id, who create a game with a great
engine that they can make money off as a game but also license to
other Lisp game developers - then you start boot strapping the whole
situation (and this is how the C++ middleware market was created as
well)
[...]
You guys keep thinking that Lisp will succeed because it is
technologically superior. I'm happy to conceed that point, I just
don't think it makes any difference to the market.
You seem to be talking about a "market" of programmers who want
to obtain third-party "tool chains" or "middleware" with which
to develop their games.
Alternatively, individuals or individual companies could decide to
create (from scratch) their own Lisp software tools in which to
develop their games in Lisp. (Exactly what programs need to be
written depends on how you are going to use Lisp for the product.)
Then, rather than re-sell their tools, they could just use them
to their own strategic competitive advantage.
Maybe they could call the resulting product "Jak and Dexter".
http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/animation_graphics/naughtydog.lhtml
By the way, The first commercially successful game I can think of that
was written in Lisp pre-dates video games. That would be Zork.
(It was written in an old dialect of Lisp called "MDL".)
I don't know whether you think that's very relevent to this
discussion or not; just thought it was an interesting historical tidbit.
Lisp has mostly been used for things other than developing games.
But graphics and AI, for example, have always been mainstays.
and those two domains certainly intersect with video games.
It has only been fairly recently that most computers were powerful
enough to run Lisp, so it hasn't been an option for most developers.
Lisp has a history of about 40 years, and for about 24 of those years,
"roll your own" is the approach that its practitioners have favored.
Sometimes this was because the libraries didn't exist, or it was hard
to interface to them, but often it was just because better libraries
and tools could be easily written in Lisp. It's an approach that's
insanely expensive in other languages - most companies want to cobble
things together by writing as little software as possible, especially
these days. Lisp is no magic bullet, of course. But for various reasons,
most people are quite unaware of this quarter century history of great
commercial successes using Lisp in just about every kind of application
domain that you can think of.
I think video games is probably a good domain for Lisp because
if the target platform is Mac/PC/Linux, it integrates well enough
(and is getting better), or if the target platform is some toy box,
then you have a foreign embedded cross-development situation of the
sort that Lisp has been very successfully used for many times in the past.
I don't think we're in much disagreement, except as to how much
sense it makes for someone to consider Lisp, which is pretty subjective.
Until fairly recently, most people could not even afford computers
powerful enough to run Lisp, so it wasn't an option, even if they
wanted it. My only point is to show that there's more than one way
of skinning a cat, and some people have found Lisp to be a good way.
)