Speaking of Technology....

I've been having some interesting chats lately with a new friend in SL who is a programmer.....(he's a Mac user, I'm windows) and as I have assisted him with various SL learning curves (that we all have been thru lol) he has lamented more then a few times about how archaic the programming is for SL.
Without being tedius with individual examples.....every time a new issue arises and I have to explain to him why that can't be done in SL.....or why it has to be this way, and not that way......he'll go off on a technology tangent about how it would be so easy to re-program SL and make things run so much smoother.

Most times I am at a loss because I don't have the proper lingo to explain to him why it isn't quite that simple.....I have a relative understanding (based on marketing alone it would be a nightmare for LL to upgrade everything all at once....half of us would fall off the grid, never to return).....but, he insists that it IS that simple.

So.....all you mega techies out there......what programming language does SL use? I'm sort of asking a bit of a crash education on basic programming here.....and where SL stands in the current technology standard. I think my friends frustration is going to drive him right out of SL......he says there's another virtaul world he wants to check out (it wont be anything like SL.....but he's not really into the whole creative aspect anyway) But I have hard time relating because I don't have experience with basic programming.

It's very PG for certain.

Except when something really bad happens. the the programmers will go "shit", "bugger" and other such words.

The programming language is still lsl2 or Linden Scripting Language. I recall hearing it was developed by Cory Linden, who is no longer with us on the grid.

Last year, (I think) they changed the core or engine of LSL from. . .uh whatever it was--to mono.

The original lsl compliler still runs, since there are programs out there that we don't have the source for any more. When you save a script, you have a choice of whiche compiler to use, but it defaults to mono.

Gee. Well, the *language* will soon enough be up to us to implement. We get an LSL compiler built in to the sims, and for the moment that's all there is, but because it's now based on Mono, there's the possibility of enabling other languages, and a C# API is said to be in prototype form now. (I'm really not crazy about how this is getting implemented, but... anyway, if this guy is a C# programmer, probably he'll be all happy pretty soon.)

The thing is, nobody who's programmed for long can actually bring themselves to care about languages anymore. Good and bad languages come and go, supplanted by others better and worse. Everybody has their own way of dealing with language misfeatures (for LSL, an external editor is a frequent choice, allowing one to augment the language with missing features that resolve to native LSL in a preprocessing pass).

For some, complaining about programming languages is more fun than programming, and it's a lot easier to get good at it.

The SL server is written in C++, C, Perl, Python, and a variety of other languages.

The scripting language is, as noted, called LSL.

The LSL compiler is written in yacc/lexx with a C++ back end that can generate LSO code for the legacy runtime, or CIL for the Mono runtime. The same compiler is in the client software with a backend that provides syntax highlighting.

Speak for yourself. If a language doesn't support native reflection it's just a toy. You can do a lot with toy languages like LSL, C#, and C++ but they're not worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence as Lisp or Smalltalk.

Guy Steele wrote Common Lisp: The Language and co-wrote C: A Reference Manual. There, I mentioned them both in the same sentence (making the fair assumption that C is included in that list of toy languages).

Reflection is the toy, albeit a nice one. C is the Corvette, C++ the Maserati, Lisp is the Escalade, Smalltalk is the Bentley concept SUV, and reflection is the Airstream trailer.

This Thread needs a Rosetta Stone - /me got lost after, "I've been having..."!

*whoosh*

C is Ford's Model A, C++ is the British Mark I, Lisp is the Buick Dynaflow, Smalltalk is the Ford Econoline, and reflection is the automatic transmission.

My wife insists on driving a manual. Now she insists on my taking her car because she broke her ankle and can't shift. But at least she doesn't need to rebuild the gearbox to shift into reverse.

Programmers. Sheesh.

If we weren't attention-deficit obsessive-compulsive sock-thieves, you wouldn't have all these cool toys to play with.

Good point. /me sits in the corner petting the ferret and lets all the foreign speech flow thru..

This is great you guys! LOL Thanks....

I'm going to send my friend to read this as soon as I talk to him again. I think he will be thrilled at being albe to converse with other folks knowledgible in programming. It's greek to me for the most part.....tho I do understand the basic logic implied.

You guys might be getting into some mighty interesting debates once he reads this thread......in which case, I'll start making popcorn for the rest of us~!!!

Fixed that for you.

Sure, but LSL is pretty awful. Well, the lack of extensibility, without painfully doing it yourself in basically non-reusable ways. You can use the distributed model to reduce that a bit, but then you incur otherwise unnecessary performance penalties.

OK, all I really want is decent collections types.

All the good stuff is written in BASIC.

DAMN! I was just about to say that!!

I'd be happy if it had a switch/case statement rather than doing the @!*# nested if...then statements. And a return or take to inventory rather than llDie.

We probably agree more than not. I haven't actually enjoyed programming, in and of itself, since I gave up my Symbolics ever so long ago. But of course that was a lot more than a language--and a lot more than I get even now from Eclipse and Mercurial and pick-your-poison language, or by crossing over to the dark side of Microsoft's framework du jour.

Since none of it is worth a damn, I find it difficult to make distinctions among contenders for slightly less crappy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

I don't know much about programming or anything but surely, if SL was so backward and stone-age, it would have been left behind by other versatile user-created virtual worlds. There's a reason why SL is as it is. You could have 3D graphics of the quality used by the film industry but you'd probably have to put up with about 3 frames a minute!

back to the OP's question...

it's simple why we CAN'T just rewite it all at the drop of a hat.

here's the short list
time.
Manpower. (see above)
testing/debugging. (see above)
Compatability (see above )
porting everything to use object oriented structures. (see above)
efficiency (the above may not yield fast enough code)
cost (see all above)

the base problem is that current costs don't allow for such a complete rebuild under a time constraint, and realistically adding more monkeys to the barrel increases time in testing/debugging (within certain limits). add to that the fact that most of the current budget is spent in maintenance and attracting new sources of income.

sure with an unlimited cash flow and and a million monkey's you'll eventually get Shakespeare, but while you're waiting, you'll get usenet (or /b/ for a more current example) =X

Whenever I hear something like this about complex systems I take it as a sign of genius or immaturity an inexperience. Lets hope your friend falls in the former category.. and if he does, he should go work for LL..

.d

Ha, one would think a Mac user would be all too aware of how tough it can be to replace an environment wholesale. Apple tried with Pink, Copland, a brief flirtation with Be, nearly went out of business, and only got its act together after years with the NeXT merger, and even then the old stuff had to be run in a weird hacked-up VM-ish mess.