Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Forth Warrior: A Programming Puzzle Game (github.com/johnearnest)
126 points by RodgerTheGreat on Feb 17, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments



More like this on Hacker News, please.


This has done the rounds a number of times, and thus it was inevitably what was brought to mind upon reading "Forth Warrior":

http://globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/...


This month's PLT Games is about gamification of programming languages, you should submit it: http://www.pltgames.com/competition/2013/2


That is really neat, but I'm not sure it would be fair to other competitors- I started Forth Warrior before the competition began.


Care to do one for COBOL or any of the older languages? I have always wanted to toy with them.


I have toy compilers for FORTRAN and Logo- perhaps one of those could be a good candidate? One of the main reasons I built this program was to help expose people to Forth, a language that I find very beautiful and powerful. It should say something that I wrote the game itself and its Forth engine in a dialect of Forth, too. If there's something you find beautiful about COBOL, there's no better way to share that than writing something with it. I'm always open to new languages, but for the process to be fun it needs to be a language I enjoy myself. At any rate, when I make other games in this vein I will always try to come up with designs that highlight the power and uniqueness of the languages I use.


This would be great if it was for a language that had more popularity. I mean, Forth is great for learning what a stack is or how to program a telescope (look it up), but think how great this could be to help folks learn Pascal or Basic. We could help the next great generation of programmers!

Just kidding. I actually got a real kick out of seeing this again, reminding me of my old ValForth and FigForth days on the Atari.


Is your whole comment just kidding, or are you just kidding about helping the next great generation of programmers?

I'll take a programmer who with a deep understanding of Forth over a programmer who cobbled together a Rails app on Heroko.

Every day of the week.


I'll take a programmer with a deep understanding of anything over a programmer who cobbled together anything.


Side point, unrelated to the article.. If you like Forth, you could do worse than to have a look at Factor.


Lua Warrior would be a good port/sequel. I imagine the setting could be more futuristic and occur on the Moon.


This looks wonderful, but there needs to be a downloadable binary that can just be double clicked. Otherwise you have a huge chicken & egg problem here.


For the time being, here's a standalone Jar: http://www.mediafire.com/?qs64gczqkay3ma0


This puzzle made me remember a pretty impressive game (unfortunately too ignored) called Core Wars, where programs fight each other inside the computer memory -> http://youtu.be/Du3DSs7hWRA and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War


I should definitely make a port of this for the web. I love things like this.


It would actually be pretty easy to port the VM it runs in to JS/HTML5- Mako is only a couple hundred lines of Java, and features like sound and file I/O are optional: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako/blob/master/src/MakoVM.j...


You probably could do APL Warrior in one line!


If I was 13, I would be all over this. Hard to justify time investment these days.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: