Hi, can y'all help me boost my startup project on hacker news? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945910

it's for a new project called https://nearhe.re

well you don't have to upvote it, but why flag it? lol ;_;

Genuine non-trolling question: Does Racket beat Clojure for designing DSLS? I just worked through the first 3 chapters of Beautiful Racket (stacker, funstacker, stackerizer) -- and it seems like Racket provides alot more "hooks" for hijacking the parsing process / building DSLs.

it does, but i think we're not so much about doing DSLs around here, or rather data is the DSL

code is data, but more importantly data is code

though one might argue that defining a function is already building a dsl

I've never created a DSL in Racket, so no expert there, but Clojure is definitely not about creating new syntax within Clojure source files, except to the extent that writing macros creates new syntax. There are no reader macros, for example, which is intentional by design.

Clojure macros are clj sexp -> clj sexp; whereas Racket DSLs is doing stuff like: https://beautifulracket.com/bf/intro.html

can't wait to do database access with a brainfuck syntax =)

I agree that cli sexp -> cli sexp is not nearly as monumental a change of syntax as those described there. Many people consider macros as defining "new syntax", in the sense that you often must learn that particular symbols or keywords within the sexp mean different things within an invocation of the macro, than they mean elsewhere.

With a parsing library like Instaparse, you can certainly write parsers for arbitrary context free grammars, and transform those languages into something else. It isn't "built in" to Clojure, though. The result of the transformation could be Clojure code/data, or anything else you wanted.

What's a good way to get started with lightweight sprite animation for making browser based games?

I recommend Canvas/WebGL

Can you draw with that? Like vectors in illustrator?

@d4hines what do you mean?

In Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, or Affinity Designer, I can make 2D vector art (I have no particularly skill in it, but others do, and they’re the standard tools). What’s the standard for making animations of 2D sprites? I think a while back it would have been Flash, but that’s lost favor.

I don’t want to have to code every shape and movement.

@d4hines I don’t think there is a “standard” per se. I would say SVG is what people would commonly go to for vector animations. Canvas/WebGL are pixel-based but vastly more performant, so you would go to that if you are going to have a lot of elements on screen.

Those are the underlying techs though, there are of course librairies to simplify interactions. e.g. you could check out https://www.pixijs.com/

How are people cranking out these thousands of mobile games? Stuff like pixijs?

no idea; I would guess various different librairies, all using canvas/webgl

Wow, that’s nuts. I would have thought people would have rallied around some sort of professional studio software (a la Adobe Photoshop)

I’m sure there exists software to simplify development, but I am not aware of a super standard one like photoshop

I mean, with WebGL you can import 3D models designed in Blender etc

it’s not like the tech is isolated

As someone who worked at Adobe, I would probably recommend all sorts of things over PhotoShop 🙂

Once I left, I was very happy to uninstall all those suites and get several GB of disk space back.

what’s the adage… Any system will eventually be (or be replaced by) one that can send and receive e-mails?