The Lobster Programming Language
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The Lobster Programming Language
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Re: The Lobster Programming Language
#2Nice! So it looks like polymorphism is done via C++ template-style ad-hoc polymorphism? Are there any restrictions on it?
Also, is there any kind of sophisticated pattern matching? I feel like for me a language without pattern matching is a non-starter these days.
Re: The Lobster Programming Language
#3I had seen Lobster before, but not really looked closely. Seeing it again now, I think I was wrong to dismiss it. Just at the syntactic level with semantics described in the link, it looks like it really might be "Python done right". The link mentions lots of features, but the following bits caught my eye.
The let/var declarations for constants/variables is much better than implicit declaration, which silently hides typos and necessitates ugly global/nonlocal declarations. (Mojo offers this improvement too.)
I don't know for sure, but it seems like it's embraced block arguments comparable to how Ruby or SmallTalk does it. So you can add your own control flow, container visitors, etc. I think of this as another syntax for passing a lambda function as an argument, and I'm curious if Lobster's optimizer flattens it to a basic block when possible.
I think I'll try to learn more about it. I wonder if the name is a nod to Accelerando.
Re: The Lobster Programming Language
#4This is a really nice looking language. Feedback in case the creator sees but it wasn't obvious to me at first that it was targeting game development. The first mention is in features:
> Features have been picked for their suitability in a game programming language
Would be fun to see some basic games like tetris, pong etc in Lobster in case anyone has an example floating round?
Re: The Lobster Programming Language
#5Obviously some will find this a silly opinion but the one thing that turned me off the most about the Nim programming language was its use of significant whitespace. The same is true with F# (and of course Python). Having had apps with YAML for config, and having had nightmares trying to copy/paste config directives from various sources, I just find whitespace to be unwieldy.
Now that's a strong opinion, (weakly held - as a language can't be judged based on this design decision). But it does sour my interest a bit.
Re: The Lobster Programming Language
#6One of the few light excellent C++ projects
Re: The Lobster Programming Language
#7One thing I hate about Generative AI is that it has flipped the value prop of making your language similar to an existing popular language. This helps new programmers but it really messes with generative AI. I can feel the era of fun new programming languages that might break big ending.
Re: The Lobster Programming Language
#8Obviously some will find this a silly opinion but the one thing that turned me off the most about the Nim programming language was its use of significant whitespace. The same is true with F# (and of course Python). Having had apps with YAML for config, and having had nightmares trying to copy/paste config directives from various sources, I just find whitespace to be unwieldy. Now that's a strong opinion, (weakly held…
I'm automatically going to be interested in any language with significant white space because there are very few mainstream ones and I hate the visual clutter that block delimiters create. Pretty much there's just Python. Scala 3 can happily do both.
I think we'd be better off if text editors just had option of representing braces and such as consistent indentation. Block delimiting tokens should optionally have semantics of non directly printable characters like new line or tab.
Re: The Lobster Programming Language
#9Obviously some will find this a silly opinion but the one thing that turned me off the most about the Nim programming language was its use of significant whitespace. The same is true with F# (and of course Python). Having had apps with YAML for config, and having had nightmares trying to copy/paste config directives from various sources, I just find whitespace to be unwieldy. Now that's a strong opinion, (weakly held…
YAML has given me eye-twitching ever since I went on an ill-considered quest of setting up wifi on a Debian server years ago.
I never figured it out by the way - just bought a really long LAN cable.
Re: The Lobster Programming Language
#10Well, it has an animal mascot logo. Which is my personal yardstick for if a project is destined for success. So, off to a good start, but the lobster could be more cuddly.