Re: Ironic comment RE: cooperative multitasking

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis@...>]

On Sat, 2002-06-08 at 14:13, Bret Mogilefsky wrote:
> On Sat, 2002-06-08 at 09:38, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > The fact that enough game companies don't find languages like Lua useful
> > says that there is something Lua is missing that it shouldn't be.  All
> > that I can really think of tho is a) *real* multi-tasking, and b) a more
> > newbie-friendly syntax.
> 
> You're writing as if every game company out there with a scripting
> language of their own has evaluated Lua and passed on it.  I honestly
> don't think game developers are saying "Lua's got no *real*
> multi-tasking?  Screw that, I'm going to go write my own language from
> scratch!"  I'd say the number one thing missing from Lua is *exposure*.

I was actually looking at the number of companies that *have* looked at
Lua, or even previously used Lua, and passed on it.  Check out the dev
forums or developer updates of some games, you'll notice the designer
will go over various features, touch on various languages (I've Lua
mentioned a number of times, although not as often as one would like)
and pass them up in favor of a commercial package (Java was popular for
a while, then seemed to die off as a game scripting language) or a
in-house tool.

One advantage Lua has over Java/Perl/Python/etc. is being *designed* for
embedding.  Any developer not thinking they can easily embed Lua is on
crack... I had a full Lua interpreter running flawlessy in MUDix (when I
was working on it) in a couple hours.

Given the license confusion people kept having with Lua, that may have
been a turn-off as well...  That is fixed now tho, yes?

> 
> There's a tendency among all programmers, and especially game
> programmers, to rewrite what came before assuming they'll save time by
> not trying to customize something written by people who didn't have your
> needs in mind.  
> 
> I know I did that for my first game (previous technology was more
> trouble to improve than to replace), but I was lucky enough to have
> heard about Lua first, so I replaced what came before, all right... with
> Lua.
> 
> (And by the way, Lua's syntax is incredibly forgiving... That was
> actually the first reason I chose it, before knowing anything about all
> of the other benefits of size, speed, flexibility, etc.)
> 
> 
> Bret
> -- 
> Bret Mogilefsky * Mgr. SCEA Developer Support * mogul@gelatinous.com
>