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Show HN: Pragma Twice – A dystopian sci-fi themed programming game

Hacker News - Thu, 09/10/2026 - 9:00am

Hey HN, I'm Bryan. I released Pragma Twice earlier this week in anticipation for Steam's "Programming Fest". Pragma Twice is a programming puzzle game in the same vein as Untrusted (https://untrustedgame.com/). You have to write real JavaScript code to incrementally improve your playable character's "kernel" over the course of the game. Beating levels autonomously (without keyboard inputs) reveals a competitive time/code golf aspect to the game.

I started developing Pragma Twice over 4 years ago after playing Untrusted and loving it. It took so long to develop because I'm not a full time game developer... between my actual job, my kids, and my own self-motivation, it's taken a lot longer than I originally hoped to get this game shipped! It's definitely what you might call a passion project. Anyway, I plan to keep iterating on it, so give it a spin and let me know what you think!

A few technical details/challenges:

- The game was originally written in vanilla JavaScript, but I later converted it to TypeScript (which had an astonishing ROI)

- Uses PixiJS for the graphics and a custom game engine built around Web Workers + SharedArrayBuffer for sandboxing and guarding against things like infinite loops

- The web version is hosted on GitHub Pages, which was challenging because of the SharedArrayBuffer requirement (I use https://github.com/gzuidhof/coi-serviceworker to work around this)

- The linux/windows versions use Electron

- Uses CodeMirror for in-game editor/console

- Levels built with LDtk

- Automated game testing with Puppeteer

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3528840/Pragma_Twice/

Dev Notes: https://www.bryanpg.com/games/pragma_twice

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643036

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

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Show HN: Sindlish, a programming language for Sindhi speakers

Hacker News - Thu, 09/10/2026 - 3:33am

Hi, I’m Amanat, a student from Pakistan, and I’ve been working on a programming language called Sindlish.

The idea started from wondering what programming would feel like if the language used the vocabulary of the language you actually speak. Sindlish is designed for Sindhi-speaking communities and currently uses Romanized Sindhi syntax.

A small example:

```text kaam jor(a, b) -> adad { wapas a + b }

adad jawab = jor(3, 4) * 2 likh("jawab =", jawab) ```

It currently has its own lexer, parser, resolver, bytecode compiler, stack-based VM, type system, error handling, collections, closures, CLI/REPL and VS Code support.

It’s still a work in progress, and I’d really like feedback on the language design and the implementation.

Website: https://sindlish.vercel.app/

The website may be a little slow right now since most of my time is going into the language itself rather than the website.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49639784

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

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