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Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

Context:

For those who are puzzled (as I was) as to what this CPU is for, I found this:

> Notch's next game, 0x10c, "will allow players to create their own spaceship in the far, far future of an alternate universe ... More exciting - especially for those versed in programming languages - is the ship's computer. It's a fully-functional 16-Bit CPU that controls the entire vessel..." http://www.dealspwn.com/notchs-space-trading-game-real-calle...

Also: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/4/2924594/minecraft-creator-n...

http://0x10c.com/

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It's good to see Notch working on the Little Coder problem, even if that's not his direct intention. :)

Ugh. Googling Little Coder problem matches "small code problems" and "little codec problems" before something remotely related to what I wanted. There's a single relevant result in the first page.

The verbatim search returns a very good match in #1 and about 80% of the results seem appropriate. It seems the recent synonyms fixes are not nearly enough.

And, for the interested: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2009-12-28-the-little-cod...

Well, you actually wanted a synonym (Little Coder's Predicament not problem), just not the ones they appear to give.

For what its worth, _why's article is the third result for me, and a couple other articles on it are in the top 10.

Little Coder problem = how to get people interested in coding by writing little programs. Hard to do on consoles and iPhones.

I started thinking that if I was going to get people interested in coding, I'd start with something more approachable - maybe something like a subset of Python, Java, Ruby or even JavaScript (it's where so many people write little programs anyway now). I heard Lua mentioned as a good scripting language too.

Then I wondered - is this CPU a reasonable target for those kinds of little languages? Is this a way to be language independent and have them all? If so, why not something more like the JVM to make it easy?

It seems to me that coding for this CPU is more like a mini-game in the main game; the fact that it's a challenge is part of the game.

It is possible that someone will implement versions of those languages, but this CPU is so memory and speed constrained that you'd be hard pressed to get much useful done. And if the speed of your programs executing turns out to be relevant to success in the game, then people using an interpreted language will be at a possibly decisive disadvantage.

That said, I can see a nice friendly language becoming popular for non-time-critical tasks where ease of experimentation is most important. I just hope it's not BASIC. :)

This project begs for a BASIC interpreter.

Thanks for mentioning this. I was getting real confused about why someone would create a CPU/ASM for their game. Thought he'd then have to build the new game on top of that CPU and notch is crazy but that seemed a bit much..

It's not completely unheard of. State machines are pretty popular in FPS's, and the Infocom Z-machine code is still used (although upgraded quite a bit) for modern "interactive fiction"/text adventure games.

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