Ierusalimschy's^* thing

Important Note: This story allthough a continuity on yesterdays 'everybody programs propaganda' is meant for humans that normally do not program. Why should you read this? Because you work with computers and want to be in charge. Some software people really want to dialogue with you and not only research your behaviour through user interface design labs and search data analysis. I also think that you should reflect on what we geeks do. Please do not force us to research you. Enough shit has happened yet.

Maybe some of you played one or the other of the mentioned games and thus appreciates that the languages I will be talking about have been used by designers and conceptionists to develop funny games. Trying to understand programmers will help you fomulating your ideas and feelings on computing better than by forming user demand coalitions to force us to program what gurus say you should buy. It will also help us better to do things that you can use instead of what theorists and the marketing dept. say. It's a give and take, that's easy enough.

ORF-Ski Challenge '06, which is toughly coded in the quintessential superprogrammer language C++ and runs on Windows only (no offense meant, don't understand me wrongly) made me think back to long ago experiences and reflections on game portability, flying spaceships and niche languages.

Mostly I've got too little time for that now, but that's what jontevs are for: Offer yourself a little peace of mind, have a little ‫שלום for you and your dearest, lean back and reflect about who and what you forgot in the last years.

Scripting Languages, that were nearly alwas meant for users to easily solve little problems, have a rich history. Very many came and went. Many of them are only in those sad "Where are they now?" obituaries. I for example kind of liked Hypertalk (in Hypercard) and OpenScript (in Toolbook) not bad. UserTalk (Frontier) and Lingo (MM Director) where more of a mixed experience. While being the favorite of early webdays, Perl, which was meant for the administrator, never found favor with me. But, for a while, what finally convinced me and pulled me into the fantasy of objects scripted by users was, when I became enamoured by scripting languages running in virtual machines that where and are called Adventure Game Engines. 3 of them come to my mind quickely:

SCUMM, SCI and LUA.

SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) was developed at Lucasfilm Games by mainly Ron Gilbert and Aric Wilmunder in '87, carried early joystick/mouse (as opposed to keyboard command) driven adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Zack McCracken, Indiana Jones and the last Crusade and LOOM. From its native Commodore C=64 it was ported to many platforms and gave Lucasfilm Games a lot of its initial impact. It incarnated in 8 versions and had only to give in over 2 years when "out of Brazil" LUA (see lower) came along. Mr. Gilbert maintains a weblog with a funny Comic, Grumpy Gamer. "Escape from Monkey Island" contains "an in-game joke about the replacement of SCUMM by Lua: The Hero returns from a journey to find the famous geeky "Scumm Bar" replaced by a more user(=tourist)-oriented "Lua Bar".

The Sierra Creative Interpreter of Leisure Suit Larry and King's Quest Fame created by Jeff Stephenson et alii was yet another of these beasts. Just a bit later in coming than SCUMM (1988) it was originally designed for IBM PCs and compatibles and for the then actual CGA/EGA (Color/Enhanced Graphics Adapter) and 320200 resolution with 16 colors. Vow! It quickly went to 256 colors and then the classic VGA resolution of 640480 and even the ability to run in Windows 3.1. Its time of glory seems to have ended in '96, even shortly before SCUMM that was finally abandoned by LucasArts in '98. Like with SCUMM there are lots of <a href=="agisci.cjb.net">nostalgia buffs who continue to develop free versions. SCI did bring forth one game (Gabriel Knight) that could have interested women, which flopped. Of all 3 languages it seems to have been and helped create the most boyish and geekish environment, which is a problem in many digital games anyway.

^*Lua, which was created in 1993 by ^{lnk for the lazy}Roberto ^{lnk for the hlf lzy}Ierusalimschy (what a name!), Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes at the papal catholic university of RdJ (what a place) still is the supreme principe in medievally inspirated cyberspace. It is one of the many tasty and important ingredients in WOW (World of Warcraft), for example.

Non programmers jump 1§ ahead here

(Lua used to be under the BSD license and is now MIT licensed. It even seems to run on the .NET CLR with the help of Byte Code Translation. Here's a nice tutorial and there is a lib to luascript Java objects.)

For the really interested (inclusive of die hard computer language buffs) the most interesting texts though are on the docs page of lua.org. You'll find out about other nice stuff, e.g. that Lua was explicitely intended for "users that were not professional programmers". In the Lua History page you will also read a nice example of how strong media power of magazines was back then, a mere 9 1/2 years ago: Lua spread to the gaming world via one single article in "Dr. Dobb's Journal". Having read it one Bret Mogilefsky <mogul@lucasarts.com> (what an email adress) who happened to be the lead programmer on "Grim Fandango" wrote the Lua guys an email with "LUA rocks! Question, too." as the subject and the anouncement that he wanted to try replacing SCUMM with LUA.

In the mean time Lua has not only been used from large industrial applications to bobile devices but also by we do not know how many games companies and more games programmers and designers in even more games. Alone by its name (portuguese for moon, which is female) it has got less of a macho touch. It's "syntactic sugar"¹ supports that notion too.

All of these 3 languages and Lua the most deserve study by the interested user who wants control, the software historian, the tech philosopher and extreme implementor alike.

Summary: If we want to stay in charge of where computing is going over the next years, we need more user-techie real-dialog. Better and easier userscripting facilities could broaden and deepen the platform of understanding in this process.

Annotations ¹ According to wikipedia syntactic sugar is a term coined by Peter J. Landin for additions to the syntax of a computer language that do not affect its expressiveness but make it "sweeter" for humans to use. Credits We have to thank god, the universe, our fellow human beings, whatever, that we now can access the necessary HACOFs (hopefully adequately connected chunks of i.) nicely systematized in a more convient and faster form than yesteryear (Caveat: Fast retrieval and fast thinking's got their own dangers as books, printing, religious wars and radio broadcast effects have proved long ago).

Audience Concept and Intention Disclosure For an ending to these musings and all ye scripting gurus: This might be old and rotten boring soup to you but, nature helping, this hopefully will one day be read by future UCPMs(UseConfigureProgramMyselfers).

The . problems in this story seem to stem from the usage of right to left oysyes above.