Yeah, that was the idea. Just a language for fun and specifically for code golf (solving programming problems in as small a program as possible). In the case of Retina, it turned out the language is actually pretty useful for throwaway scripts for string manipulation, so I actually am using the language while working occasionally, but that was definitely not a design goal. :D
Yeah, it really is surprisingly similar to sed. "Surprisingly", because when I first designed the language I knew nothing about sed, and I still know very little (but I've seen people convert programs between both languages in a fairly straightforward manner).
FWIW, they're usually called esoteric programming languages/esolangs, but I'm not a fan of that term. That's why I've been using "recretional" instead. :)
Hi, author here! Thanks for the feedback. I'm not in charge of Try It Online, so I can't do anything about filling it with code by default, but as someone else noted, there is a Hello World button, which fills in a (very trivial) snippet.
There also a bunch of examples with tutorial-like explanation in the Examples folder.
I'll think about adding one example to the main README though, just to really put people off of looking further into the language. ;)
While I'm here, in case anyone does actually use the language and find it to be useful, I also wrote a VS Code extension that lets you use it as a powerful search-and-replace alternative: https://github.com/m-ender/vscode-retinate
(I am not affiliated with Dinosaur Games in any way. Just a fan of the game.)
> (Incidentally, branding aside, this article piqued my interest in the game. Is it worth a play?)
I've been playing the game on and off for a month or so (since their A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art post went viral). I think it's really nice. From what I've read they wanted to create a game with simple rules and lots of emergent complexity, and they definitely succeeded with that. Even without a story mode, it's quite engaging, and self-balancing (the difficulty level rises the more you win but goes down again if you start losing too much). There are still a few flaws, but nothing jarring, and I think the developers are aware and are still actively improving the game. I'd really like to see their ongoing Kickstarter to succeed (which would add an actual story mode and some other things), but unfortunately it's not looking promising so far. With or without the story mode, definitely worth a shot!
The problem is, regex flavors differ, and RegexPal uses JavaScript - whose regex flavor is really limited compared to most others (including Python). You should always try to find a tool that uses the regex flavor you are targeting.
Yes, this is explicitly a tool that uses PCRE via PHP. So I'd expect the behaviour to exactly reflect that of the `preg` suite in PHP... which does not use `u` by default.
In the quiz, for competitive motivation it would be nice to see if you actually broke the current record on a quiz. Right now, there's no way to tell, whether you just caught up with the current record holder, or whether you've set a new one. ;)
Otherwise, great update!