Lambda the Ultimate

The link - Nu Game Engine Release v1.0.0.0

The spiel -

Over two years in the making, and 1700 commits, the world's first practical, pure functional game engine, the Nu Game Engine, releases v1.0.0.0!

This release offer a greater guarantee of API stability than could be offered before.

I am hoping that Nu Game Engine will usher us toward an era of sustainable game development, because developer's lives matter, too! And if a game is torture to develop, its play experience isn't going to reach its potential.

Now that the days of being able to statically lay out the memory for an entire game are gone, it's time for developers to consider an alternative lifestyle where dynamism is a tool to be leveraged rather than eschewed.

Nu proves the efficacy and efficiency of game development with a pure functional API. Nu proves that hardcore optimizations like data-oriented physics engines, mutable spatial trees, and other computer-sympathetic data structures can be used transparently underneath a purely functional API.

Further, Nu proves that declarative programming style is also viable and sufficiently efficient for modern game development - Iterative Functional Reactive Programming with the Nu Game Engine

Whether or not people adopt Nu, I hope to at least offer it as proof that the prejudice against dynamism and functional programming in games at a high level is obsolete. And for those who don't believe, it's time to break out your profilers!

It's time for game developers to start having as much fun as we did so many years ago before we got run over by unbounded complexity!

@Moderator: Feel free to post to front page if deemed appropriate.

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm in the wrong field. Many seems to be fixated on just language rather than resulting programming experiences (e.g. does this code look good vs. how was this code written?). The general sentiment of the field is clearly language-focused; e.g. take this post from pl-enthusiast:

From this vantage point, PL researchers tend to focus on developing general abstractions, or building blocks, for solving problems, or classes of problems. PL research also considers software behavior in a rigorous and general way, e.g., to prove that (classes of) programs enjoy properties we want, and/or eschew properties we don’t. ...

The ethos of PL research is to not just find solutions to important problems, but to find the best expression of those solutions, typically in the form of a kind of language, language extension, library, program analysis, or transformation.

So a focus on abstractions in the abstract, which is completely reasonable. But does is it really represent programming? Not really, PL doesn't seem to be about programming. It has applications to programming, but...

I’ve picked the three examples in the above discussion for a reason: They are an approach to solving general problems using PL-minded techniques in combination with techniques from other communities, like machine learning inference algorithms or cryptography.

So...PL is not about programming, rather it is a specific kind of theory field oriented around abstraction, which has applications for many other activities as well. In that case, my disillusionment with PL is just a matter of misguided expectation.

But that begs the question: what is a good academic home to talk about programming experiences, where PL is just a minor component of those activities? HCI? SE? None of those feel right.