[jblow]

It is cute, but you can't design a language for toy problems or you run into problems with bigger software.

I kind of stopped reading here:

"Since it is declarative code, update returns a new world w2 instead of merely modifying w1. The funny thing is, just by doing this our code becomes 200% better. For example, you can now modify the code to store all world states in a list!"

Uh huh. Try doing that with a nontrivial game that needs to be performant, and let me know how that works out.

[jblow]

I should clarify before people respond antagonistically ... as someone who is designing a programming language, I think it's great any time someone is making languages and trying out new ideas. That part is great, if you want to make a functional imperative declarative loosely strongly typed language then hey, go for it.

But I think one has a responsibility not to try and sell one's project as something it's not, which especially means being careful with claims. I know this is sometimes hard because a lot of language design stuff comes from the academic community which notoriously overclaims (because it is their job to overclaim), and it is easy for that culture to rub off.

But if you are going to say something like "just by doing this our code becomes 200% better", with a straight face, about something that most practitioners know is going to be terrible in most cases without a tremendous amount of additional work and solving of unsolved problems (solution not shown), you're just telling the reader that they can't take you seriously. It's a bad thing to do.

[corysama]

> But if you are going to say something like "just by doing this our code becomes 200% better", with a straight face

I think this is something a lot of people here are having a hard time with: The article is not being said with a straight face. The unsolved problem of elegant I'm-holding-back-a-funny-face font technology has confounded the Internet for forty five years and still counting.

[tinco]

I kind of like the style. One shouldn't ever read an opinion piece seriously anyway, he's the author, he's going to be telling you it's great. Of course it's not going to be 200% better, just like it's not the best programming language ever designed.

To me it feels like he's trying to open up the audience a little, if he's enthusiastic enough, perhaps people will go "this guy is so crazy for it, maybe there's something there". I mean it is a tough sell. A semi-functional programming language with optional types based on SWI-Prolog of all things? I bet he hasn't even solved how to deploy and run prolog in a transparent manner yet. This thing is going to be tough to polish.

On a side note: I'm super curious about your programming language, do you have anything on paper yet? I'd love to see even a short blog post of what the language looks like in your mind right now.

I'm working on a language for games as well, sort of, I call it Nancy, or Non-ANSI-C. It's basically C (literally using the Clang compiler) modified to have less inconsistencies, replacing header files with modules, and perhaps a little bit of structure. In my opinion games don't particularily need all the fancy abstract features of C++, they just need the bare metal access C gives, plus easy access to libraries and a good way to interact with an entity system. That last point isn't quite designed in my head yet, but I think it's a critical feature for game development. Every game project has their own entity management system, you either design it yourself, or fight with one someone else designed, they're less trivial to implement then you initially think, and the syntax of the language never cooperates. I think it would be cool if there was a language that was designed specifically to accomodate CES/ES.

(Jay for jumping off-topic to force my opinion onto internet celebrities ;) )

[spc476]

James Hague wrote about Pac-Man in a functional style (http://prog21.dadgum.com/23.html). He also wrote about the speed of an image decoder written in Erlang (a functional language) that was surprisingly fast (http://www.dadgum.com/james/performance.html).

[DennisP]

If it's using persistent data structures (like Clojure) it might not be all that slow.