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Wow, I’m amazed someone noticed this. I’d be interested to know more about your background and interests. How much have you been looking at programming language design vs just designing for complex systems in general?

I ask because yes, I have put in a great deal of time and effort into the programming language design, and to me, I think that is the greater achievement, more than the automatic multiplayer. But the benefits of automatic multiplayer are easy for the general population to understand and the improvements programming language design is hard to convey and so people don’t normally get it. The fact that you can see what I’ve been trying to do so quickly shows you must be coming from a place which has developed that discernment for you.

While there are many inspirations, like I love coding using React for example, my primary inspiration is the last game I made, I released all the modding tools along with them and lots of non-coders loved it. The modding was JSON, which might sound primitive, but it was actually a hierarchical declarative domain specific language and it seemed to really work for people intuitively.

Easel was born from me spending 2 years trying to make an imperative programming language in a similar shape as that declarative one. I wanted it to be just as easy, but infinitely more powerful. It took a lot of iteration to merge the declarative and imperative styles into one language. There is so much to it - lexical lifetimes and ownership, reactivity like you noticed, but also weaving in concurrency and asynchronous programming seamlessly took time as well.

I really wish this is more the part of Easel that would stand out and be talked about more because I think it’s the coolest part.

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