Building a game, need a language with strongly supported first class functions

Question

I'm building an educational game which, through it's modularity, allows for teaching students how to program. It's essentially a generic card game which can easily be modified.

The backbone of the game is supposed to be totally uneditable (at least in theory), so I need to build a "Card" type that allows for an anonymous function as it's action (even worse, or perhaps even more interesting, it needs an anonymous function that can have an arbitrary number of arguments).

I also need a strong GUI library, and it needs to be portable, and if at all possible it should be potentially be a web language. It should have extensive support for modularity, be object oriented, and hopefully be clear enough that it doesn't require an experienced programmer to understand the syntax. That's a lot of requirements, but I'm supposed to be detailed and I want a specific answer and why it'd be a good choice, so I should put as much information as possible I think. I have no real need for efficiency of the language, so low level languages are not necessary in this case, very high level languages will easily be fast enough.

Python isn't strong enough. Ruby may be but I'm not familiar enough with its features. Haskell and Scheme have the strongest support but aren't web languages and, so far as I know, don't have GUI libraries for the most part. C# may be reasonable, I'm not terribly familiar with its features, but I'm particularly worried about portability. If at all possible I'd like to avoid javascript, but if that really is the best option, I'll probably have to go in that direction.

Answer 1

python + wxpython

Answer 2

Javascript seems like a perfect choice for you - first class functions, portable, web-based, clear syntax, good library support. I know you're trying to avoid it, but I hope that once you've evaluated and rejected all other choices, that you'll give Javascript another chance.

Answer 3

I would go with C# or perhaps F#, in the form of Silverlight. C# and F# both support anonymous functions (including lambda functions), and a variable number of arguments.

Silverlight apps can be delivered over the web, support a rich graphics library, and will run in most browsers, on both the PC and the Mac. Support for Linux should be available "soon" (Microsoft and Intel are apparently working on it). In the mean time, there's Mono and Moonlight.

From a game application perspective, Silverlight is nice because it supports things like timelines and animation. Plus, being able to separate markup from code helps keep the design clean and manageable.

Answer 4

If you are familiar with Scheme, check out DrScheme programming environment.
It has GUI support and it's ported to Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

Answer 5

Have you considered scala? It runs on the JVM, so you can leverage the Java swing libraries, and still have a strong functional language to code in.

Answer 6

FWIW, if you're teaching programming, you may also want to make sure the language has a good development environment -- a context sensitive editor and a powerful, easy-to-use debugger are very helpful. Chances are that first time programmers are going to make lots of little mistakes and being able to easily step through lines of code and view variables and debug is as important in learning how to really program as all the theoretical parts such as using lambda functions.

Answer 7

Have you considered C++, it keeps it simple. You could have a 'CORE' thats a binary and then just get your students to compile libraries that the C++ file calls, that way each student can submit a folder with all the different library and all you would have to do is move the binary to the folder and run it. The binary would use their libraries to execute the different aspects of the code you wanted to make modular.

This approach has the added effect of teaching them how to work in teams too, you could have one person write the render subsystem, another the input subsystem, etc. And all you would have to define in your binary is a set of skeleton functions that you call to do the logic for those sections.