First post, by JoeStrout
Hi guys — newbie going out on a limb here, so please be kind. 😀
First to introduce myself: my name is Joe Strout, and I've been coding since I was a kid with a TI-99/4A. Some folks around here might be old/geeky enough to have read some of the articles I wrote for Nibble magazine back in the day (including a couple of cover features!). I was also the lead engineer at Real Software (makers of REALbasic, which is called Xojo nowadays) for about ten years before moving on to other things. I've also done stints at various times teaching programming to kids, which is something I'm passionate about (though anybody with an eagerness to learn counts as a kid in this respect).
In the last couple of years I've taken all that, along with all my gripes about other scripting languages (especially Lua and Python), and poured them into a new one called MiniScript. It was designed to be an embedded language you might use (or find) in other games, and indeed there are a couple of games in development now that use it (GreyHack for example, which you can find on Steam). But the real secret goal I've had all along is to create an environment where people today can learn to program the way I did: by booting up a machine with a blinking cursor, in which you can type commands and make stuff happen. There is something truly magical about that, which today's fancy development environments do not capture.
So I've started building "Mini Micro," a sort of 80s-style virtual home computer from an alternate universe. Instead of BASIC it uses MiniScript, which is modern and clean. And it'll have more power than a real '80s computer, with support for tiles, sprites, digitized sounds, maybe even networking. In terms of capability, it'll probably cap out around SNES level; I have no intention of adding support for 3D graphics, for example.
It's still a work in progress, but far enough along that I'd like to start discussing it with others like myself, who might enjoy the retro-style interactive-command interface to a more powerful platform. Where to find such nutty people, though? So I did some searching on likely keywords, and found my way here.
If this is off topic for this board, I do apologize, and welcome any suggestions for other communities I should try.
Thanks,
- Joe