Observant readers will have noted that I’ve been digging into LSL lately, along with Rails. LSL is the scripting language for Second Life , the virtual world created by Linden Research and its residents. There doesn’t seem to be much “official” documentation for LSL, but it’s reasonably well described in the LSL wiki . It’s a vaguely C-like scripting language with some interesting quirks (for instance, there’s no reasonable way to store persistent data). It does, however, have the ability to make both HTTP and XMLRPC calls to servers outside of SL, which means that it’s perfectly possible to create objects in SL that talk to a Rails application out in “First Life” – which is what I’ve been pursuing.
The interesting thing about Second Life is that it has a whole shadow economy going on, with a currency of lindens that are reasonably liquid and that do exchange with US dollars (one way in which Linden Labs makes their money is by taking a substantial rake off of such exchanges between players – if I sell you lindens for dollars, the house gets a cut). Some people have famously made enough lindens that their full-time job is now working in Second Life. I strongly suspect there is a steep, steep power law at work here, with the few poster children making good money, more making walking-around money, and many more making essentially nothing at all.
Still, playing with this stuff (and it is on some crazy boundary between work and play) does give me the chance to work with some more Rails code, and it does offer at least the potential that I could end up on the right portion of that power curve. I’ve got some ideas for goods and services that I don’t see being well-executed within the Second Life economy yet. So, who knows – it’s worth spending at least a few hours looking into this as a part of the next career.
