I really wish more languages picked up S-expressions, because they're easy to machine-generate. I can't count the number of times I've been annoyed at my otherwise favourite languages for not being able to do that.
I absolutely love this mixture of a Lisp hosted on Terra so it can take advantage of the optional static typing.
If someone wanted to do something similar for Python they could use Hy and MyPy (would need LLVM backend).
There is an easy way to generate pretty much any AST using quasiquotations. S-expressions are nice, but certainly not mandatory for a full metaprogramming.
This could easily be solved using a well-defined AST and a simple s-expression based AST printer/parser. That not many languages do that (one notable exception is Julia) is a shame!
JavaScript has https://github.com/estree/estree for example. I've written a (very experimental) S-expression syntax for JavaScript around it here https://github.com/anko/eslisp
But it seems it's still at a very early stage and lacks any kind of documentation so I'm not sure where/how to start hacking.
The game that it's developed for (with?) is insanely original and the author totally got my attention with it: http://www.duangle.com/nowhere
Looks like None is a consequence of the author learning LISP some time ago and developing a new editor for the game - Conspire. It's described in this blog post: http://blog.duangle.com/2015/01/conspire-programming-environ...
Funny thing is that after I learned lisp (clojure in my case) I came up with a very similar prototype for an editor, but never went further than the prototype, given the complexity of getting it done properly..
Anyway, I wish duangle lots of luck with the game, None and Conspire, all these projects are very original and ambitious, my only concern is that author is overstretching himself.
Is there a way I could help ?
At least with this, the work is open source, so even if the game never comes out, the language has a shot.
My normal approach in this situation is to read the source but the source is completely unreadable since it is meta-bootstrapped with weird internal stuff partly in lua, partly in terra and largely using odd meta-macros in None itself.
One conjecture I read was the name was chosen so sales could say "your users can query the database in ENGLISH".
Or a language with meta characters in it, such as C++?
Obviously, these two languages are popular now so they are the first hit but you can bet in the early days of the web, it was a bit different.
I understand your point, though, whenever I create a project, I do my best to pick a unique name for that very reason, but overall, history tends to indicate that such decision will not prevent a good product from becoming popular.
It is, incidentally, a pretty neat programming language. It seems like it had a big influence on Python.
Hint: Not Apple's.
/rant
Just take it for what it is, don't get stuck on the details.
That said, as someone who really liked the idea of Terra and enjoys Scheme (but hasn't applied it to games yet), this is exciting.
