By Elle Sullivan http://thecreativeperiod.com/elle | @THISISDINOSAUR
Sometimes I like to write my own programming languages. Sometimes I also like to do some procedural creature generation. And sometimes I like to write my own programming languages in order to do some procedural generation, using a technique called Language Oriented Programming. So, what is language oriented programming? It’s pretty straightforward, you first design and write a programming language that is tailored to the problem you want to solve, and then you write a program in this language to solve it. The general idea is that you spend as little time as possible on that final program, and most of your time on the language. The language should be so well suited to the problem that the program you eventually write in it is almost trivial.
A Dinosaur from the original Generator
Example time. I’m particularly interested in procedural creature generation. For one ProcJam, I started writing a procedural dinosaur generator, focusing mainly on skeletons. I made some okay progress, but I found it tiresome. I was writing so much repeated code and syntax that had no relation to the dinosaur bones. So I came up with a solution: to write my own programming language.
30