[HN Gopher] A talk with Walter Bright about Empire
___________________________________________________________________
A talk with Walter Bright about Empire
Author : mad_ned
Score : 194 points
Date : 2021-10-20 12:29 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (madned.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (madned.substack.com)
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I thought this was gonna be about Bright's geopolitics.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Nobody cares about my political opinions :-)
| acdha wrote:
| > WB: Empire has caused many students to flunk out, and even a
| few divorces. I've received some angry emails over these.
|
| This part resonated: my father had various issues over the years
| (we suspect undiagnosed depression but he refused care) and
| Empire was one of the games he'd spend days on. Growing up, it
| took me a while to realize that the problem wasn't the game but
| the personality trait which lead to that behaviour cropping up
| anywhere possible.
|
| I found the mention of a Wang word processor interesting as that
| was one of my dad's employers. They apparently had quite a few
| management issues but he had some stories about one of their
| better salespeople -- this one guy apparently had legendary
| expense claims but was also frequently the top performer in
| revenue. When word processing was a department in a business, it
| was often run by an older woman who'd come up through the ranks
| and while they had a high-sounding title they often weren't given
| a lot of respect by the other department heads and a lot of the
| other vendors more or less followed that with a take-it-or-leave-
| it approach. This sales guy would do things like rent a
| helicopter to take someone from LA to lunch on Santa Catalina to
| discuss a deal or see how things were working out at an existing
| company -- simultaneously far more than the internal rules
| allowed but also a tiny fraction of the profits they made from a
| major company buying Wang hardware globally.
| mad_ned wrote:
| You may not have played the game Empire, but if you've played any
| computer wargame, you've played something influenced by it. I'm
| very honored to have had the chance to discuss the development of
| Empire with Walter!
|
| As mentioned in the article, he is a sometimes-reader of Hacker
| News, so if people have any follow-up questions, we may just get
| lucky and have him drop by to answer a few.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| Walter here! AMA!
| juanuys wrote:
| Hi Walter, thanks for your time!
|
| Do you play many games nowadays? Which ones?
|
| What do you think is going to be the next big gaming
| breakthrough? Or the next big genre/theme? (E.g. for economics,
| it was F2P/IAP, never of which I'm a fan of. Also, city
| building + survival is really big right now.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| The itch to write a better language & compiler than anyone
| else is more compelling!
|
| But I am attracted to full motion simulators that would, say,
| enable me to drive an F1 car without risk or much investment.
| fb03 wrote:
| If you're into that, I highly recommend you looking up
| Force Dynamics (a friend of mine) for high quality
| affordable driving simulators that are really close to
| actually driving the Real Thing (TM)
|
| https://www.force-dynamics.com/
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| It's sad that we still don't have an idea how to produce
| high g-forces in a simulator.
|
| The feeling of going with a car through a turn at 2g is
| incomparable to the simulators we have. Never mind F1
| cars that can corner and brake at up to 5g.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It can be done, you'd just need a big playground for the
| machine - about the size of an F1 track!
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| With enough money you can actually go to such a
| "simulator". There are these guys that run older F1 cars
| on tracks. The teams provide pit crews and everything
| else. If you can afford it, definitely a nice hobby!
|
| I got to drive a car with aerodynamic downforce only once
| and it's super impressive to feel how it works better the
| faster you go. Cornering with 2g is also pretty nice.
| cybernautique wrote:
| Hello Walter!
|
| I'm interested in programming languages and the design of
| compilers. I'm relatively novice to programming, but languages
| have long captured my imagination.
|
| Three questions for you: Do you have a blog where I can read
| about your compiler escapades? have you any advice for the
| aspiring novice? which is your favorite language, and why?
| WalterBright wrote:
| > where I can read about your compiler escapades?
|
| I don't really have a blog, but when I do write an article
| I'll link to it on twitter:
|
| https://twitter.com/WalterBright
|
| A collection of articles I wrote a while ago:
|
| https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/index.html
|
| Presentations:
|
| http://www.walterbright.com/
|
| And, of course, the Emperor who will get mad and put another
| continent under iron control if he's not mentioned:
|
| https://twitter.com/classicempire
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| Advice for the novice. Hmm. Best advice I can give is ignore
| your critics and everyone who tells you it can't be done,
| you're not good enough, you'll inevitably fail.
|
| Market research has always led me astray. Making things that
| simply please myself have been far, far more successful.
|
| Which is my favorite language? D, of course! As for why, it's
| the language I always wanted to program in, though I didn't
| realize it and it was a process to discover it.
| cybernautique wrote:
| I've listened to the two interviews you have published, and
| I intend to work my way through your publications. I'm
| currently in love with OCaml, but I'm resolving that D
| should be my next language. Funnily enough, I'd already
| downloaded it a few months ago; I have a dedicated flash
| drive for storing compilers, it was a very pleasant
| surprise to find Walter Bright already chilling in my
| memory.
|
| I loved the podcast you did with Alexandrescu on
| GoingNative! The two of you said that you want D to have a
| million users; how does user accumulation work in
| programming languages? Intuitively, I'd expect linear
| growth until some critical point, and exponential
| thereafter. Do you agree? if so, what do you think that
| critical mass might be?
|
| Also, on that same podcast, the host evaluated that D is
| ready for the million users you're shooting for. Do you
| have any plans to open a software shop or a consultancy to
| bring D into the industry? I've seen certain other language
| organizations, like the Haxe folks, do similar.
|
| With regards to D-Lang: why do you ask that contributors
| assign copyright to you for improvements made to dmd? Is
| that just so you control the code-base?
|
| Finally, I'd love to see a section of low-hanging fruit for
| novice contributors to work on. Whatever incentive it's
| worth: I will personally commit to fulfilling at least one
| item of any such list, if and when it should ever be
| published.
|
| I'll be following D-Lang much more closely, I'm very
| excited to see how it evolves!
| WalterBright wrote:
| I figure critical mass is if I get run over by a bus, D
| will continue just fine. I don't know what that point is.
|
| Many D community members do consultancy and education.
| Just drop by the forums and ask!
|
| The copyright assignment thing is just so that the source
| will be unencumbered and we can ensure it remains fully
| Open Source.
|
| I never offer suggestions for low hanging fruit anymore,
| as not a single person took them. I just point at the
| forums, hang out, and you'll soon find something
| interesting to work on.
|
| There's also the learn forum:
|
| https://forum.dlang.org/group/learn
| [deleted]
| simonh wrote:
| Thanks for such a great game. I remember playing Empire on my
| Amiga back in the late 80s, it didn't have any of the fancy 3D
| graphics of my other games but I still played Empire the most.
| I still play a clone of it frequently on my iPad.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Graphics are great for initial attraction to a game, but it's
| the gameplay that keeps one's interest.
|
| It's similar to movies. Special effects are momentarily
| interesting, but it's the plot that overwhelmingly matters.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And characters.
| OJFord wrote:
| That pretty much sums up American vs. British comedy
| (televisual anyway) for me.
|
| US: 'momentarily interesting' (resp. funny at the time) -
| series of one-liners and the like; UK: character
| development, hard to explain why it's funny, might take
| 'getting into'.
|
| _Green Wing_ for example - I thought it was absolutely
| absurd when I first saw it, and it is. But for some
| reason I went back to it (or was made to) and stuck with
| it for a few episodes while I learnt to love it. And now
| I do, it 's one of my all-time favourites. And of course
| I've been back (several times) to watch the first
| episode(s) again, and they're hilarious too.
|
| Or perhaps a clearer example is the original UK _The
| Office_ (Ricky Gervais) vs. the US version (Steve
| Carell). Same rough outline obviously, some of the same
| (especially early in the remake) storyline and jokes, but
| somehow even then the humour is very different.
|
| (I'm not hating on the remake, I enjoyed it enough to
| watch it all once I accepted it's different, and stopped
| expecting 'The Office' as I knew it. Especially once it
| found its own path and diverged from the same jokes - IMO
| - worse delivered.)
| kbenson wrote:
| I think it's less that the US doesn't have those, it's
| just that they have both types, and they also mix them.
| Seinfeld wouldn't have been half as good as it was
| without you knowing the character and how they would
| react to specific situations.
|
| I think part of what you're identifying about first
| episodes is maybe a difference in style between the US
| and UK. A lot of UK comedy definitely seems like the
| characters are pre-baked into the writing and the actor
| is already mature in the role in the beginning, while in
| the US it feels like they've left the role a little
| hollow at first and allow the actors (and future writing)
| to evolve the role into what it will be. This can make
| the first episodes feel "off" when you go back to watch
| them, but I'm not sure it's necessarily a bad way to go
| if the goal is to find a really good character.
|
| It's also possible that the UK network(s) are amenable to
| planned out entire seasons while the US networks are more
| accepting of buying a pilot of a few episodes and seeing
| where something goes, which would favor some of these
| approaches in each case.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The first few Seinfeld episodes are pretty lame compared
| to when the series hit its stride.
| kbenson wrote:
| I think that's an example of what I'm saying. Rather than
| the characters being mostly realized by the writing, they
| let the characters and actors grow into specific parts
| together.
| pixelgeek wrote:
| I have tried that game. I find it a bit too difficult to play
| without a keyboard. Or just too slow. I am still, after all
| these years, used to rapidly moving units with the keyboard
| JaDogg wrote:
| What kind of projects I need to do and books I need to read to
| be a good programmer in your point of view?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Writing games are a really fun way to learn to program. The
| best way to learn how is to find an open source game that you
| like, figure out how to build it, then start modifying the
| game to your personal taste.
|
| Learning the basics of writing compilers will be surprisingly
| helpful for all kinds of programming tasks. The Dragon Book
| is the best:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-
| Tools...
|
| Too bad the prices are so high for it. The original version
| is much cheaper:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Compiler-Addison-Wesley-
| in...
|
| Learning calculus is a great way to train your mind to think
| better.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Have you dived much into full body VR and VR social
| experiences?
| WalterBright wrote:
| That sounds like fun, but I've never tried it.
| int_19h wrote:
| D is one of the few mainstream languages today that support
| Design by Contract (https://dlang.org/spec/contracts.html), and
| I remember it being a prominent language feature all the way to
| pre-1.0.
|
| The only other major language I can think of that's still
| actively used is Ada in its more recent incarnations. Eiffel
| didn't get much traction, and .NET dropped
| System.Diagnostics.Contracts recently due to lack of usage. C++
| had some proposals that didn't go anywhere, if I remember
| correctly. Java has some AOP-based third party solutions for
| it, but nothing is in the core language, nor any plans for it.
|
| Why do you think that is? I don't see what's wrong with DbC
| conceptually, and having (effectively) formalized specs helps
| both document the code better, and catch bugs.
| mhh__ wrote:
| People don't bother using them. Walter gave a hits & misses
| talk a while back and I believe he classified contracts as a
| miss.
|
| I do really like them. In certain situations they are
| actually useful to the optimizer too, saves some branches on
| array length alignment for example.
| int_19h wrote:
| Yes, but _why_ people don 't bother using them? It can't
| just be an aversion to verbosity, since people _do_ write
| unit tests - many of which could have been contracts
| instead. And it seems like there 's increased interest in
| preventing bugs through more rigorous static code analysis
| these days (Rust etc), so why doesn't it come up in that
| context?
| justin66 wrote:
| Hey Walter. I played a lot with the DOS version of the game
| that Mark Baldwin worked on (perhaps also a later windows
| version, although I probably just played the DOS version on
| Windows). Two things that struck me as "off" at the time were
| the way calculating the distance when moving units wasn't as
| consistent or intuitive as it could be when moving diagonally
| because the board consisted of squares, and that multiple units
| couldn't be parked in the same place unless they were in a
| city.
|
| Are these things you'd handle differently today? Are there any
| games that you think handled this better? A hexagonal board
| layout seems like it might be a better approach to calculating
| distance between points, but what about the limit of one unit
| per one square on the grid?
|
| I love the idea of allowing players to supply a bot to compete
| against other bots.
| WalterBright wrote:
| A hex grid certainly addresses that problem, but since I was
| limited to text, squares it was!
|
| The one unit per square comes about because it is very
| difficult to see a "stack" of units in one location. It also
| made combat trivial, just move into the opposing force's
| square. No special commands needed.
|
| This wound up working fine, and I was always reluctant to
| mess with game rules that worked.
| nailxx wrote:
| Hello! Came here just to say thank you for my happy
| professional childhood. I used to closely follow D development
| since DMD was 0.48. It introduced me to some basic concepts:
| module system, cow, unit tests, invariant checks, which were
| somewhat foreign to C++ devs at the time.
|
| I remember how all the mailing list waited for 1.0 finally
| after 0.99 and... oooow... "announcing DMD 0.100" :)
|
| I was 17 at my first job ever, it was in gamedev, and I
| promised everyone that D would be the next thing after that
| clunky C++ in two (maybe three) years. That's how we should
| make games \m/
|
| Sadly, it didn't come to that extent (marketing?). But I am
| glad to visit dlang.org from time to time and see it evolve,
| and Walter Bright still rocks, 20 years after.
| gavinray wrote:
| Walter -- you've been in the game a long, long time. One of the
| first (the first?) commercial C++ compilers.
|
| 1. As a 20-something whose first (real) experience coding was
| Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008, I'd be interested to hear
| your thoughts/take on "lessons we've forgotten" or things
| programmers nowadays think is something new, but is just an old
| thing being re-discovered/re-branded.
|
| 2. Also interested to hear your take on software bloat. I grew
| up on Windows XP, maybe it's the nostalgia, but I feel like
| both the responsiveness and usability of apps has declined,
| despite a x1000 fold increase in computer resources.
|
| I can't help but get this sense of both awe and disgust that
| when I was a little kid, programs were written with so much
| more efficiency.
|
| The peak of absurdism for me was when I sent both an SNES
| emulator and an SNES game ROM as a Discord chat message
| attachment to my wife the other night. The ENTIRE PROGRAM took
| up less space than a picture of a houseplant from my cellphone!
|
| (Just 4MB, out of the 8MB limit for message attachments).
|
| What're your thoughts here? Are we doomed?
|
| --------
|
| By the way, I <3 D.
|
| It might not have a very big ecosystem, or huge backers, but as
| a LANGUAGE I can think of almost nothing I enjoy writing more.
|
| (Though if there were an official LSP/tooling in-tree so that
| IDE intellisense worked when using UFCS syntax that would be
| life-changing. Currently, I restrict myself from using post-fix
| functions at all because they break Code-D's intellisense, so
| it's a waste of one of the best features =/ )
|
| Maybe Stefan Koch's new "reflect" thing that spits out the
| JSON-looking AST can be useful for this? I'm not super
| knowledgeable though.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Thanks for your thoughts. I'm not sure about lessons
| forgotten, but there are definitely lessons never learned.
| One is the use of macros in programming languages. Macros are
| one of those great ideas that seem almost miraculous. They
| provide immense power to the programmer.
|
| Unfortunately, the dahk side of macros inevitably consumes
| the user. The macros inevitably become so confusing,
| pervasive and complex that the author winds up inventing his
| own undocumented mess of a language, unusable for anyone
| else.
|
| For example (one of my favorite anecdotes!) back in the 90s a
| friend of mine worked at Microsoft. A manager showed him a
| program written in assembler that needed a bug fixed. Several
| programmers had been assigned to it one after the other, and
| they all failed.
|
| It seems the original implementer, who had since left the
| company, had invented his own macro language using MASM,
| Microsoft's macro assembler. Nobody could figure it out.
|
| My friend said "I can fix that" and fixed the bug and checked
| it in in two hours. The manager, astonished, asked him how he
| figured it out. He said "I didn't figure it out. I
| disassembled the object code using Walter's disassembler that
| turns it into assembler source code, found the bug, fixed it,
| and checked in the new asm source code!"
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| > The macros inevitably become so confusing, pervasive and
| complex that the author winds up inventing his own
| undocumented mess of a language, unusable for anyone else.
|
| This is not limited to macros, but any abstraction.
|
| Let's step back and rewrite the quote:
|
| > The abstractions inevitably become so confusing,
| pervasive and complex that the author winds up inventing
| his own undocumented mess of a language, unusable for
| anyone else.
|
| The key fault that trips up so many talented programmers
| (if not all) at least some point during their career (and
| hopefully not continuously, though I certainly know a few
| cases) is confusing convenience with simple. Convenience is
| almost always more complex, not simpler. Macros happen to
| wear their complex hearts on their sleeves.
|
| You can address any of these problems by _addressing the
| problems_ you succinctly listed: documentation and
| usability.
|
| Take React for example. It's an abstraction, arguably a new
| "language", and requires ample documentation and usability
| concessions to be palatable. You could accomplish this with
| macros as well.
|
| But like any abstraction, the real problems arise during
| maintenance, and thus it becomes a Software Engineering
| problem -- whatever that means. This is where Software
| Engineering as a poorly-defined pseudo-profession has
| failed to demarcate itself from simple programming: the
| quality, maintenance and longevity of living code bases.
|
| The masses unfortunately still don't see the forest for the
| trees, so I agree that it's something we've never seemed to
| learn, if perhaps using a broader definition.
| sp33der89 wrote:
| So I'm not a fan of metaprogramming or heavy abuse of
| tricks for convenience either, and I do get and agree
| with your point!
|
| But for some anecdotal nuance concerning the React
| example: > Take React for example. It's an abstraction,
| arguably a new "language", and requires ample
| documentation and usability concessions to be palatable.
| You could accomplish this with macros as well.
|
| I feel like the standard before React was just every
| (web) framework inventing its own templating language,
| whereas I found React to be really easy to learn, because
| the way it abstracted things were straightforward and
| well explained. It's tooling however is one of the
| scariest things I've ever seen haha.
| klodolph wrote:
| I recently wrote a React app without using the "create-
| react-app" tool... just by writing JavaScript code, later
| TypeScript, and bundling it with Rollup.js.
|
| Doing things this way shows you that the tooling doesn't
| _have_ to be complicated. I assume that there are very
| good reasons why the tooling is complicated--stuff like
| code splitting, modular CSS, etc. If you're writing pure
| JS React and putting the CSS elsewhere, you can squeak by
| with fairly simple tools.
| random314 wrote:
| > This is not limited to macros, but any abstraction.
|
| Disagree here. Unix process, file access api's,
| programming languages are all abstractions that make life
| easier.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Disagree. There are abstractions and there are
| abstractions.
|
| Macros are too big of a footgun of an abstraction.
| Because they can change the syntax of the language, they
| can hide functionality in non-obvious ways and they're
| just another band-aid on top of the languages limitations
| (the two latter points are especially true for C). And
| more often than not they're worse than just writing using
| the languages capabilities.
|
| Yes I'm sure people writing C macros will sit down and
| document them, and make them usable. Not.
|
| That being said, Rust macros are a world apart from C
| macros.
| fouric wrote:
| There are macros, and there are macros.
|
| You've used C and Rust macros. Have you seen Common Lisp
| macros?
|
| I've read a fair amount of Common Lisp code written by
| other people, and every time I had difficulty
| understanding something, it was invariably plain CL, and
| not a macro.
|
| Maybe C programmers just have difficulty exercising
| restraint when writing their macros. Or perhaps the
| design of the language and the macro system (which is
| basically just text pre-processing) don't mesh well
| together.
|
| Regardless, I haven't noticed macros being a footgun in
| CL. Sure, there are doubtless people out there who have
| abused it (and will continue to do so) - but that's true
| for _every_ language feature; meanwhile, it doesn 't seem
| like macros themselves are actually a problem, in the
| sense that they're particularly easy to abuse compared to
| the rest of the language (a distinction that I might give
| to C raw pointers, for instance).
|
| If anything, (good - CL) macros are _easier_ to
| understand than many other features, because they 're
| (usually) referentially transparent functions with a
| clearly defined input and output that runs once at
| compile-time, on known data, which you can manually
| expand and inspect, and they tend to rarely interact with
| other features of the language. With rare (but useful)
| exceptions, macros don't involve networking, async,
| threads, dynamic environments, databases, stack limits,
| or any of the other strands in the spider-web complexity
| that tends to make programming hard.
| WalterBright wrote:
| At one point, I decided to unwind all my use of macros in
| C. I was actually very happy with the result. My code was
| much better.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > another band-aid on top of the languages limitations
|
| Those limitations are real though, and getting in peoples
| way. I'd also add most language designers would not
| consider C macros as "real" macros.
|
| Think of abstractions as power tools, you want to use the
| least powerful one that solves the problem so you don't
| lose a hand. If you're cutting a string you pull out some
| scissors, if you're cutting a 10 foot thick steel rod,
| you grab some hydraulic shears; so it goes with
| abstractions.
|
| Most people never need macros, the abstraction equivalent
| of hydraulic shears, because most of the time your
| problem isn't that difficult. That doesn't mean those
| problems aren't out there or that macros shouldn't exist.
| gavinray wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to reply Walter, genuinely
| appreciate it! > "Unfortunately, the dahk
| side of macros inevitably consumes the user. The macros
| inevitably become so confusing, pervasive and complex that
| the author winds up inventing his own undocumented mess of
| a language, unusable for anyone else."
|
| Yes! Modern languages have all adopted this approach it
| seems, trading macros for proper compile-time expressions.
| Rust uses "#[feature]" I believe, pretty sure Zig and Nim
| has something for this as well.
|
| I am very sparing even when using mixins/template mixins in
| D -- the second you do, it ratchets the debugging
| difficulty up to "11" and becomes am order of magnitude
| harder to reason about program state.
|
| Great power, great responsibility. I'm an "avoid at all
| costs" kind of guy, unless you can really justify it.
|
| If C++ didn't have macros (which invariably get abused,
| along with templates) I think I might not hate it so much.
| Let us pray that the "constexpr" idea they "borrowed" from
| you may slowly fix this a little over time ;)
|
| I went through a phase earlier in my dev career where I
| thought "Metaprogramming is so powerful and cool!", and
| I've put that behind me now. I just want boring, easy-to-
| read + maintain, predictable code.
|
| Ironically I used to poke fun at Java and .NET but I've
| come to appreciate the "stupidity". "Dumb" is easy to
| understand, "dumb" is easy to maintain. "Clever" is bad.
| > "My friend said "I can fix that" and fixed the bug and
| checked it in in two hours. The manager, astonished, asked
| him how he figured it out. He said "I didn't figure it out.
| I disassembled the object code using Walter's disassembler
| that turns it into assembler source code, found the bug,
| fixed it, and checked in the new asm source code!""
|
| Ha!
|
| I suppose while I'm at it, I ought to thank you for all the
| Digital Mars tools that myself and many others still use
| today:
|
| https://www.digitalmars.com/ctg/ctg.html
|
| The Digital Mars tools for working with PE/COFF files and
| libs/binaries are indispensable. I suppose they've helped
| many tens of thousands of people.
| WalterBright wrote:
| They're certainly indispensable to me! Some of them I
| wrote for the purpose of understanding the file format.
| Writing a pretty-printer is a great way to understand.
| pixelgeek wrote:
| Were you involved with the DOS version of the game? A friend in
| university had a copy of it on the DOS machine we used to type
| papers and I got rapidly sucked in after discovering it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The character mode DOS game I wrote. The graphics one was
| converted from text to graphics by Mark Baldwin.
| pixelgeek wrote:
| Did it still use your AI?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yes.
| codyguy wrote:
| Hey Walter, What were your "salesman" lessons from Empire? What
| would you do differently today?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'd do everything different today. Being a nerd, I had
| absolutely terrible social skills and did everything wrong. I
| couldn't sell a $20 bill for $10. I've been trying for
| decades to do better with that.
|
| But the best lesson is to associate with someone who can
| sell.
| Torwald wrote:
| Why can one city just build one unit at a time? Is there a game
| design rationale behind this?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Too many units too fast just seemed to create a logjam where
| then you'd have your units attack each other just to get them
| out of the way.
| Torwald wrote:
| Thank you. This is something the Civ5 designers should have
| known.
| tombert wrote:
| Hi Walter.
|
| I was curious about your opinions on some of the mathey
| functional languages out there, like Haskell or OCaml or F# or
| even something more elaborate like Idris or Agda. Do you feel
| like they should have a place in industry, or just high-level
| self-indulgence?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I took Erik Maijer's course on Haskell, and enjoyed it quite
| a bit, though I haven't written a line of Haskell. D makes
| available a number of functional language things, like
| transitive immutability, purity, and lambdas. Haskell went a
| bit too far with minimizing the syntax, as redundancy in
| syntax makes for better error diagnostics. Otherwise it's a
| nice language.
|
| I attempted to write some code in OCaml, but failed
| miserably. My (short) programs would fail with
| incomprehensible (to me) error messages. Trying different
| syntaxes just produced other messages. Other than the OCaml
| book, which I had, I couldn't find any helpful information
| online. I gave up on OCaml. OCaml may actually be a great
| language if it had a better compiler and far better
| documentation.
|
| I know nothing about F#, Idris or Agda.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| The Computer History Museum really needs to do an interview with
| Walter to add to their oral histories series. pls halp.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I loved Empire Deluxe so much (by Baldwin & Bright) -- my
| favorite in the series -- that I once wrote my own private clone.
| in C and OpenGL. even drew all the bitmap icons and tile graphics
| myself. went nuts adding extra unit types. now gathering dust on
| a "disk" somewhere. Tell myself some rainy day I'll resurrect
| it...
| mindcrime wrote:
| Great interview! I've always thought it was really neat that
| Walter posts here semi-frequently, and it's really fascinating to
| get even more of a peek into the mind of such a creative
| individual.
|
| Now I really need to get serious about starting a project in D so
| I can learn it properly...
| WalterBright wrote:
| I still have plenty of critics :-)
| dang wrote:
| Here's Walter's comment which the OP refers to at the beginning:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28658090
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > My interest in Empire is not so much playing it anymore, it's
| devising a better computer strategy. I'm a lot more experienced
| in how to do such things today, and the temptation is strong to
| go do it. But I need to focus on my compiler stuff.
|
| Please, karma grant me this wish: ...
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