Lobster is a game programming language

http://strlen.com/lobster

by albertzeyer • 12 years ago

75 19 12 years ago

strlen.com

albertzeyer• 12 years ago

Another source code example: http://i.imgur.com/ZZWFkXn.jpg

Its entire source code fits in the screenshot.

From here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8659273

bananaoomarang• 12 years ago

Strikes me as a nice idea, but why not just build for/use an already built library for a pre-existing language?

It does look nice, I'm just not sure the tradeoffs of building in a unique language are worth it, since it doesn't seem to add all that much.

jamesu• 12 years ago

The author has a history of creating programming languages, so It's really no surprise he's made another. As for why, it seems likely based on the introduction text he was aiming to make a portable language specifically designed with game developers in mind.

emiljbs• 12 years ago

Considering the feature list, doesn't Common Lisp also qualify as a game programming language then?

swah2• 12 years ago

Jonathan Blow is also writing his own language for games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ

I think this is great (more languages).

Note that this is not by @strlen (Alex Feinberg)

jeffreyrogers2• 12 years ago

Jonathan Blow has a whole series on YouTube discussing the language, and at one point there is even a demo of the language and the compiler! The whole thing is really exciting and the language looks well thought out. It's nice to see a system programming language where the focus is more on getting things done than on making the type system pretty.

swah2• 12 years ago

Yep. And his demo is a little game... :) There's not enough time for seeing all those videos though.

dirkk0• 12 years ago

Oh - this was done by the author of the Cube Engines a.k.a Sauerbraten.

Wouter van Oortmerssen is not exactly a Newbie. He is at Google now. This might be more interesting than I initially thought.

segmondy• 12 years ago

Every language is a game programming language.

hellbanner• 12 years ago

"Lobster is a general purpose stand-alone programming language that comes with a built-in library suitable for making games and other graphical things. It is therefore not very suitable for non-programmers."

Dewie• 12 years ago

What's the significance of it being "built-in"? How is that an advantage over a language with a reasonable package/module system, so that any game-making libraries can be used as easily as the standard library (after downloading it etc.).

jeffreyrogers2• 12 years ago

I wonder how fast it is? A lot of game programmers hate C/C++ but feel like they can't use anything else, since they don't have the same control.

Edit: I reread the page and it says about as fast as non-JIT Lua, so probably good for a hobbyist, but not a production quality game.

Jach3• 12 years ago

Worth reading the philosophy page: http://strlen.com/files/lang/lobster/philosophy.html

"The most important over-arching reason behind everything in Lobster was to make it a pleasant language to use for one single person: me, the author."

When these sorts of personal side projects come up on HN, it seems inevitable that people question whether anyone should want to use them... You probably don't most of the time. They're cool to look at, but I think the judgment of being cool comes more from a PL designer viewpoint than an end-user viewpoint...

peapicker• 12 years ago

This looks like tons of fun. I know what I'll be playing with over Thanksgiving break... it will be interesting to see if this could be a reasonable platform for playing with digital synthesis and spectrogram analysis and the like.

chipsy• 12 years ago

I'm a bit late to comment, but I think this language is very promising for "batteries-included hacking," much like PHP or Basic. Just, it's not a woefully primitive or erroneous design like those languages. Wouter advertises the interesting high-level features up front, but the productive appeal of any language of this style is in the easing story, and I bet this can satisfy that perfectly well.

Lobster is a game programming language

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