Origin Story

This programming language was born from a desire to bring a great game board-game online: Battlestar Galactica. I absolutely love board games. Unfortunately, every time I tried to implement it or any other board game, I find myself broken, hating everything about the technology I use.

At core, I believe board games represent a limit point of both technical and product complexity where traditional web techniques break down. However, old-school gaming techniques work better, but these old-school techniques have their own issues. The first motivation of this project is to bridge how web and old-school gaming techniques can work together in a cohesive way.

The complexity of a board game manifests when describing the implicit state machine required for people to communicate and execute complex rules which interact among players within a single conceptual "turn". We take day to day conversations for granted, and the best way to overcome this technically is to eschew classical HTTP/1.1 and use WebSockets (or just a socket). However, the moment you embrace WebSockets, you have a whole new world of hurt because the internet is not reliable enough for a six-hour board game.

Furthermore, I believe good things happen when compute and storage come together. I've worked and tinkered in this space for a while, and Adama is the culmination of 20 years of problems and experience into a single language, runtime, and platform.

Now, I admit, things will not be perfect. This language is intended to be niche and limited, and I want to be exceptionally upfront about this. I don't want to over-promise that this language will cure cancer or any fanciful claims of grandeur, but I do believe we are living in a dark ages of sort with these machines. Ultimately, I strongly believe we can do better, but doing better requires putting a stake in the ground as to what better looks like.

This project is a stake in the ground.

About the name

Adama was a special Lamancha goat that my wife and I raised until he passed due to calcium stones that blocked his urethra. He was an adorable goat that would love to cuddle, and I named this project after him.