Functional Programming and 3D Games

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The computer gaming industry began in the 1970s with Pong, and has grown with the progress of computing technology into a billion-dollar industry. [1] Todays commercial games are sophisticated pieces of software and may be written in hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Most commercial games require one to three years to develop in contrast to the development cycle typical of games in past. Most of the development cycle involves initial programming and then lengthy testing and changes to the initial code. [2] Many game developers are concerned with the length of game development cycles, as longer game development cycles mean higher costs and a longer period before there is a return on investment.

Recent advances in computing have seen functional languages lead to better productivity in many industries. Ericsson have used a home-grown FPL, Erlang Language to build large telecom systems. In certain tests, they claimed to have measured improvements in productivity between 9 and 25 times greater.[3] It is plausible the video and computer gaming industry may also benefit from the use of functional languages. Functional programming languages offer many advantages compared with the imperative languages that are widely used in this industry. Functional programs are much more concise when compared with imperative programs. They allow for the use of powerful abstractions which can be used to improve structure and modularity of code. Functional languages also allow for polymorphism which promotes the reuse of code and less redundancy in programs.[3] Download free Functional Programming and 3D Games.pdf here