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Comment by mordocai | Hacker News Reader

It might be good to point out to you that the general industry cares very little about things like this.

Racket could have literally the most advanced and robust type system out of all programming languages in existence, and still be used by the same amount of people as today and have a hard time convincing anyone else to use it.

What makes a language popular from what I have seen are libraries, frameworks, and community.

Edit: Racket has all of the above, so obviously there are other factors as well.

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The general industry is in fact starting to care about static typing; I've seen it happening lately. The last batch of hot languages included a lot of untyped languages like Python, Ruby, and JS. But the latest batch of rising star languages are typed, eg Go, Rust, Scala. And C/C++, C#, and Java are still all going strong.

People are no longer buying the myth that the benefits of static typing can only be gained at the expense of heaps of boilerplate. The gospel is slowly spreading.

Don't forget Apple's new flagship language, Swift.

The tide is turning. Naughty Dog video game company (Uncharted, Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter) uses Racket as its scripting language now.

do you have a source for that? it's not that i don't believe you. it's that i am interested. :)

i have seen that one powerpoint from a while back where they used their own scheme dialect to script things. but i thought i had read that when they moved to the ps4 they left that behind and used c++ tooling for the same needs.

The scheme they have been using was PLT Scheme, which was renamed Racket.

ahh. i know racket was plt scheme originally. but from my understanding, naughty dog was using their own lisp/scheme and now no longer uses that system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

your comment made it sound like they had returned to using a lisp but had chosen to use racket this time around.

My understanding is that they are currently using Racket, but I don't work there. This is often mentioned in the Racket community, I think one of the ND engineers spoke at a lisp conference recently about it.

Dan Liebgold: Racket on the Playstation 3? It's Not What you Think!

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSmqbnhHp1c

Slides: https://con.racket-lang.org/2013/danl-slides.pdf

Naughty Dog used a custom Scheme system for their early games. That one was written in Allegro Common Lisp.

When they were bought by Sony, they abandoned their tools and moved on to C++, hoping to share code with the rest of Sony game developers. Didn't work out as wished. They brought Scheme back into their game development, but differently. For example:

http://www.slideshare.net/naughty_dog/statebased-scripting-i...

That confirms that at least in 2009 they were using Racket.

i have seen that presentation, but i am fairly certain i recall from an uncharted 4 chat with a naughty dog developer that they no longer use that system once they moved to the ps4. this is in large part, i believe, due to their being a technology developer for multiple sony studios.

http://n4g.com/news/1268353/naughty-dog-will-use-existing-un...

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