[videogreg93]

I'm not sure who this is for. On one hand multiplayer games are complicated to make, even with a dedicated framework, but on the other the tutorial wastes time explaining to me how to undo with ctrl+z and there's even a large infobubble on how to copy and paste text.

[BSTRhino]

This is good feedback! I thought it’d be a great first programming language for people and so I think I have aimed the tutorial far too basic, probably even for them. Maybe that’s where I am losing people. I am going to edit it and see if that improves the retention.

[_m6gi]

This is an impressive project and hopefully it will allow more programming beginners to get into multiplayer programming. Huge congrats. However, I am wondering: if your programming language is aimed at complete beginners, why make your language untyped and include undefined? Those are both fully loaded foot cannons. Sure, the language looks more inviting and probably gives the impression of faster development, but I'm not sure it's worth the amount of bugs that will be introduced eventually.

[BSTRhino]

Yes, in the end I just made this decision pragmatically and it's not a grand statement about how I think programming languages should work. I felt that it would be possible to add gradual typing to Easel eventually, and so chose to prioritise other programming language features.

One of the original "agitators" which caused me to make Easel was because I was so surprised at how popular the modding tools for my previous game were with first-time coders. The modding tools used JSON, which might sound primitive, but if you look past the JSON it was actually defining a hierarchical declarative language for defining game behaviour. I have many theories for why first-time coders could just pick it up, but one of them is I think the hierarchical shape meant everything could be written inline, without indirection or jumping around. This format allowed all these gamers to just accidentally fall into coding and it was quite impressive how far they got without any help.

But those old modding tools were quite limited really, and that limited how much coding people could learn. So for years I just kept wondering what would happen if someone made that magic hierarchical declarative shape unlimited by merging it with a traditional imperative programming language. Would it allow gamers to accidentally fall into learning actual coding? It took me about 2 years to squash together these two seemingly-opposed paradigms and make the Easel programming language. Doing this required slimming down on the other language features in order to iterate quickly on this big problem, so that's how we ended up not having strong typing, amongst other things. But I don't regret what I chose to prioritise, and I hope to address this in the coming years!