Why Lisp Sucks For Games

An interesting article by John Palevich who worked with Lisp before, and which addresses several points that have prevented the use of lisp. While it is centered in games, it can be extrapolated to other issues, like systems programming. -- jpnr

Here are the two parts of the article (via the WaybackMachine, because the original site has been long dead):

http://web.archive.org/web/20041209000035/www.spies.com/~palevich/CLRScheme/WhyLispSucksForGames.htm

http://web.archive.org/web/20041127111933/www.spies.com/~palevich/CLRScheme/WhyLispStillSucksForGames.htm

The author is rewriting the articles for his new site:

Site: http://spaces.msn.com/members/grammerjack/PersonalSpace.aspx?_c=

Part 1: http://spaces.msn.com/members/grammerjack/Blog/cns!1peCHL_zjY_VAAoE21WVgU4Q!114.entry

The author doesn't say when the new parts will be up, and the first part is pretty bland, so it is hard to see how the original was controversial...

A reasoned, in-depth response by Jeff Massung: http://www.retrobyte.org/show_essay.php?id=1

I just don't get the whole thing. It has little to do with Lisp failing in the arena of games, even though that's the title and supposed topic.

To begin with, he says "Lisp sucks for games," and repeats the usual anti-Lisp stuff. Then he gives a bunch of success stories and says that they either aren't Lispy enough or they succeeded because of Andy Gavin. Forest, meet trees - Lisp did work because Lisp does work. Every case mentioned has some facet of Lisp and was a financial success.

If he is trying to prove that Lisp sucks, wouldn't he instead want to mention projects where Lisp caused a project to fail? Actually, he does, by speculating that former NaughtyDog? employees no longer use Lisp. Who knows why he thought that his speculation trumps the financial success of Jak & Daxter?

He does say that Lisp is slow, but doesn't give any evidence, any specific case where it is faster or slower, and claims that Lisp can't interface with C code. Maybe CFFI, UFFI, SIOD and Guile didn't exist at the time of writing.

-- JesseMillikan

CategoryLisp