Kostiantyn Kostin
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 15 months, 2013–2025
29:59 · 139K views · Aug 2, 2013
Part 4 of John Carmack's QuakeCon 2013 keynote, covering OpenGL, functional programming, Haskell, Lisp and Scheme, typing, multithreading, events and garbage collection.
Cited again and again as Carmack's key public statement on functional programming and purity in game development, plus his remarks on garbage collection.
19 comments from Hacker News
The use of monads is a side-effect (ha!) of committing to purity throughout a language, and that's what FP is being equated to: pure statically-typed FP. (You can argue about how justified that is, of course. I'm not going into that, but you might want to see what John Carmack has to say[0]. No, he doesn't end by saying "we should all convert to the church of Haskell now", but he does talk about how large-scale game programming refactors are made easier when you're working with no (or very disciplined) side effects.) Monads are not the only way to deal with effects while keeping purity, although they were the first discovered and so on: algebraic effect systems as in Koka[1] (and as simulated in Idris or PureScript) are another alternative. Koka infers effects, so it's probably easier for a C-family programmer to pick up (I know little about it, though). [0]: this video [1]: [LINK]
I think it is, and if you don't want to take my word for it, John Carmack thinks the same :) There's an old video [0] where he talks in-depth about his explorations of functional programming. It's perhaps a bit more about Haskell than about SICP, but in it he's also quite enthusiastic about what a veteran programmer can still learn from this book. [0] this video
Raymond Hettinger's talk about good code reviews -- [LINK] Carmack's talk about functional programming and Haskell -- this video Jack Diederich's "Stop Writing Classes" -- [LINK] All with a good sense of humor.
What you describe above is similar to what Carmack discussed at his QuakeCon keynote several years back when toying with a game engine on Haskell. Very interesting talk, this video
Excellent read, I still remember a lot of it. There is also the accompanying Quakecon presentation where John Carmack talks at length about all this: this video