The Wonkey Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

The Wonkey Programming Language

github.com

64 pointsseyhajin15 comments

First official Wonkey game programming language release with Wake (Transpiler) and Wide (IDE) built for Windows, Linux, MacOS ans Raspbian targets.

Wonkey is a fork maintained by community of Monkey2 programming language designed by Mark Sibly, creator of the 'Blitz' range of languages.

Wonkey "transpiles" your code into readable C/C ++ sources and compiles on desktop, mobile and web platforms.

Community page: https://github.com/wonkey-coders Project page: https://github.com/wonkey-coders/wonkey Discord: https://discord.gg/awfuRtZay7

Join the community and improve this programming language.

Enjoy!

Great stuff! The Blitz family were an absolute joy to code in, not just because of the language but because the API was well thought out and straightforward. Good to see it moving forward.

You are welcome!

Great stuff! We're trying to do something similar (cross-platorm game development language) except designed for kids / teens and based on Logo[0]. Got a long way to go yet to catch up with these folks though!

[0] https://turtlespaces.org

Turtlespaces looks awesome. I’ve always been a fan of the mindstorms book. Is it going to be open sourced?

Yes, once we get a running start with the tutoring business we're building around it. Thanks :)

Wonkey uses the BASIC syntax which is perhaps easier to understand for beginners but it allows to do things quite complex for the continuation for experienced developers

Looks amazing! It reminds me a bit of Beef [1]. Since you seem to be the author/main developer: - How long have you been working on it? - Was integration with OpenGL painful? - Did you also write the IDE? What was the most work?

[1]: https://www.beeflang.org

We took over the project at the beginning of this year with other developers to update the main modules and fix issues. the base IDE was pretty sketchy, but another person in the community created improved version which is now integrated into Wonkey

An extension for VSCode is also available for Wonkey : https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=wonkey-c...

Lots of new languages come out that look like syntax level changes from an existing mainstream language. This looks like C# with a slightly different syntax to me. C# has a huge community, so why would I use this?

Compare that to, for example, Clojure where there is no mainstream equivalent. I can see why it exists.

Perhaps the readme just need updating?

> Lots of new languages come out that look like syntax level changes from an existing mainstream language.

This is how lots of programming languages start, but they then diverge over time: C++ started as C with some syntax sugar around structure definitions, and C# started as a reskin of Java. Over time, each has developed its own character and following.

It's a BASIC dialect. The syntax isn't arbitrarily different from C#. It was inherited from previous incarnations of this project, going back to the Amiga days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_BASIC

I adore the name of the language.

Thanks :)

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