alt Hacker NewsThere used to be a roguelike game called Angband, which was written in C. There was a vibrant community around it, many of whom produced Angband variants by hacking the text config files and the C code. One developer got the idea of making most of the game scriptable in Lua, over a C core; which would, in theory, make even more people be able to hack at the game and produce variants.
What happened was the Angband community imploded, and the number of variants went way down.
I don't know if this is a generalizable example and there may have been other factors at work, but it is a cautionary tale.
Angband is still around btw, and is still excellent. But I believe it's C and text config files again now.
Replies
whatevaa • today at 7:42 PM
Arrays starts at one scared everybody away.
When I was a wet behind the ears programmer, I learned a cautionary tale about Lisp and macros. Very smart people love macros and are good at them, and will modify things to fit their needs. Problem is, other people think different ways. A flexible language which is easy to mutate results in incompatible dialects.
The sage elders suggested that making the language harder to change (cough Python) is more likely to result in a single widely used dialect, with the differences at the library level rather than in language/macro level.