The primary reason (for AAA titles at least) is that games compete on visual quality, and that the best quality is still easiest to achieve with polygons.

Todays GPUs are perfectly capable of alternate rendering methods.. ray-tracing / ray-marching of voxels or signed distance fields, point clouds, volume rendering etc. You can find endless examples of these online, and it would be totally possible to make a game with some of these. In fact there are plenty of examples of ray-traced older games (the various Quake's, Minecraft, etc) looking pretty cool. But here's the thing: given the same amount of GPU power, you will not achieve the same visual fidelity than can be achieved with more traditional methods. They are not competitive, as the effort spent per pixel is much higher.

Then there's the issue of tooling and training: the AAA games industry is full of people that are really good at creating these polygon meshes, with their very familiar professional tools. Want to change to a different rendering style, now need to train your artists to compose models out of mathematical functions? Good luck!

These should be less of an issue for indie games: these games are totally fine not maxing out the GPU in exchange for a unique look. But even for those the switch may be daunting.

You'll need robust iOS/Android support before you can dream of challenging SDL.

OP here, let me see if I can address common comments I see here:

"why another language?" - because I can? I can't wrap my head around the thinking that creating new languages is somehow a problem for our development ecosystem. Noone forces you to use them. And like others have so kindly already mentioned, this one will probably die in obscurity, solving your problem before it even started.

"what's the point when it's not a major innovation?" - Better mainstream languages is an evolutionary process of designs building on eachother and making small incremental improvements. We will never arrive at the next big thing without tons of experimentation that teaches us what works. And if you want innovation, academia is full of programming language ideas that make Haskell feel like Basic in comparison, but they are very far off being usable. In contrast, Lobster is useful right here, right now, for a popular class of applications (games).

"significant whitespace, bzzzt" - hey, Python proves not everyone agrees with you. Would you have preferred a hypothetical world where Python and other significant whitespace languages had never existed? Oh, and in Lobster it is actually a compile error if two adjacent lines do not have the same whitespace prefix (sequence of tabs and/or spaces), meaning that it is *impossible* for code to visually look like its doing something different from what it actually does, even if people mix tabs and spaces and have different tab settings. The official Lobster syntax guidelines mandate spaces instead of tabs btw (like Python), but you are free to ignore that.

"why is this hobby project on the front page of /.?" - shouldn't you be spending your time moderating the firehose, or complaining that the moderation system doesn't work? I submitted it and it was promoted to the front page by others, why should I feel bad about that? :)
I've been making compilers for.. ooh, 24 years now, and while this project is definitely more of a hobby project than past ones, it has been in the making for 3+ years, and has had quite a little bit more thought behind it than the average result of a college compiler class (I should know, I taught one for years :)

"isn't an interpreted, dynamically typed language too slow for game development?" - you may have a point there. There are no reasons why it couldn't be a lot faster with some type inference and JIT and/or static compilation.

"why did you change the OpenGL interface?" just because functions start with gl_ doesn't mean it's meant to be a direct mapping to OpenGL. It uses OpenGL 2 and OpenGL ES 2 under the hood, which require you to write and compile your own shaders and fiddle with matrices and many other things just to get a triangle on screen. Lobster's graphics interface shields you from that and is much more high level.

The packages currently available for ubuntu are the old 32bit binaries, which you can't see if you're on 64bit. You can either use the 32bit version (you'll also need a 32bit gtk installed) or wait for ubuntu to supply the new version for both.

"grinding data into digestible chunks for his boss to use in extracting more money from an unsuspecting public"

this is good, you should write

Look at engines that actually get used for game projects in the commercial world: they are GAME engines, with a proven game for it, and a toolchain. Nobody ever licenses a naked engine, as in just a set of APIs. For a modern game, something that can render flashy graphics is only a small fraction of all the code involved.

About 13 years ago, I had a TI-81 calculator which I loved. One day I put it in my bag to take to school, along with some honey that I was going to have for lunch. The top of the honey came off and the calculator soaked in it until it became completely permeated by honey. I could see honey inside the screen. The calculator no longer worked at this point.

So I took the calculator home, filled the sink with water, and swished the calculator around in the water for about ten minutes until I couldn't see honey inside the screen anymore.

Then I let it dry out. A day went by and it still wasn't working. Then another day, still dead.

After about three days the inside of the screen had cleared to the point where it only had some condensed moisture around the edges. At this point it not only turned on on, but to my delight I discovered that it still had all the programs that I had laboriously typed in over the past few months.

The best PostgreSQL frontend I've ever used is... Ms Access.

I'm not joking PostgreSQL + Access makes a perfect combination.