Magpie and an upcoming book

I want to give a shout out to Robert Nystrom. He's a colleague at EA who is writing a book about Design Patterns for use in video games, which, to my knowledge, would be the first true book on Game Engine Architecture. Other books claim to be that but fall short of providing a valuable description of how to concoct a game engine architecture -- they merely present an example of one.

Bob also works on an interesting language called Magpie. It's really tempting to talk about his language but I don't want to steal his thunder, so go read what he has to write about it. I will mention, though, that his adoption of ML-style type inference makes me think that's the way to go.

He has nifty ideas about allowing coders to create infix operators. When I asked him if he came up with that notion, he tried to pass the idea off on older languages like Lisp that allow practically anything as an identifier, but I think he's got something new. And I want to steal his ideas.

By the way, he was also in a band.

So I guess today is Bob's day.