This week saw the release of Monkey, a new programming language from BRL which lets you code in a very BlitzMax-like dialect and then spits out projects for a variety of targets such as HTML5, Flash, iOS and XNA etc. I’m a big fan of BlitzMax’s syntax — it’s an impressively elegant, high-level way to access just enough object oriented functionality — so the opportunity to adopt it for iPhone development is just marvellous.
While the language itself is more accessible than, say, Objective-C, it’s undeniable that Monkey gives you more of a blank canvas than something like the Cocos2D library. Out of the box there’s no 2D physics solution, no meaningful support for localisation nor any equivalent to Cocos’ “scenes” — whether one sees this a threadbare feature-set or a glorious freedom from prescribed constraints is down to the individual but, even in its beta phase, Monkey was capable of turning out solid, complete games.
Personally I couldn’t be happier — coding for mobile platforms just got as pleasurable as coding for the desktop! If you’ve even half an eye on this sort of stuff then why not give the demo a try? You’d be bananas not to. Yes I went there.