On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 3:55 PM, john skaller <skal...@users.sourceforge.net
> wrote:
>
> On 19/02/2013, at 9:55 AM, Dobes Vandermeer wrote:
>
> > Hi John,
> >
> > What made Felix stand out for me, as an aspiring game developer, was:
> > • Static type checking (compared to Lua/Python)
> > • Garbage collection (compared to C++)
> > • Easy binding to C++ (compared to anything except C++)
> > • "High level language" features like closures, data types
> > • Punctuation and braces ("{ ... }" rather than "do .. end", f(x)
> is normal rather than f x)
> > Until you've made a determination that the target audience of your
> marketing will be "game developers", you should probably file my opinion
> under "interesting but probably useless."
>
> Game developers are certainly a target (including ME).
> However they're not THE target. Felix is a general purpose
> application development language like C++, Ocaml, and a bunch of other
> such languages.
>
It's just my opinion, but I don't think you have the resources to produce a
useful product for everybody. Making headway in any single market will
require some sort of concerted effort to serve that particular market
better than any alternative they are considering.
Lua is a general purpose language, but it's found its home as the defacto
scripting language for video games (except HTML5 games which use Javascript
now)
Ruby and Scala generated excitement because of their easy to get started
with (Ruby) / highly parallelised (Scala) web frameworks.
haXe is a general purpose language in theory, but in practice used mostly
for flash and mobile games.
> My view is, a domain specific language, eg one designed for game
> developers, is doomed to failure. That's NOT how you make a language.
> General purpose languages that serve multiple audiences serve
> particular audiences better than any special purpose language ever will.
>
I'm not talking about the language, I'm talking about marketing ... the
language just has to fit the bill for the target group. No point trying to
fill the same gap as Lua if your language has a lot of features and syntax
to learn - lack of features and syntax is one of Lua's features.
So, I'm not saying the language wouldn't be general purpose. But you'd be
building or linking to libraries, making examples, and joining communities
in your target audience. And choosing a target audience for whom the
language is already a pretty good choice - but a few tweaks would make it a
GREAT one.
A "general purpose language" is something that matters only in the eye of
programming language enthusiasts. For the wider market the language is
only a small part of the decision making process - examples, peers,
documentation, libraries, etc. are also very important. There's no
language with a "general purpose ecosystem". Even C++, Python, and Java
despite their widespread adoption don't have successful ecosystems in every
domain. (Java fails in gaming, C++ in web development, Python in compiler
writing, and many more).
I think for programming languages it has rarely been intentional or
predictable on the part of the language designer where the language ended
up being adopted. Nevertheless, there is a profile of people willing to
experiment with programming languages to get an edge, and it may be someone
from that group who creates a useful framework on top of the language that
goes viral. So perhaps people in that group need to be identified and
their needs met.
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