On programming and programming languages: because there has got to be a better way.
Planet Haskell readers might want to skip this one. Recently I've been thinking about the possibilities offered by embedded interpreters. This is becoming a common design pattern in commercial software -- games written in C++ embedding Lua, for example, or Python for graphical user interfaces, or occasionally Scheme, or even the JVM. However, adapting an existing full-blown scripting language…
Warning for Planet Haskell readers: imperative content! (Or, I tried to get GHC working in 2048 bytes of RAM but didn't get very far...) A friend of mine sent me a RedBoard and asked me to collaborate with him on a development idea. So I'm playing with an Arduino-compatible device for the first time. I've been aware of the Arduino devices, and the maker... erm, what, "movement?" But just never got…
So, trying wxHaskell. First, I want to try removing everything that might be left over from yesterday's experiments: Pauls-Mac-Pro:~ paul$ brew list gettext libffi pkg-config xz Pauls-Mac-Pro:~ paul$ brew uninstall gettext libffi pkg-config xz Uninstalling /usr/local/Cellar/gettext/0.18.3... Uninstalling /usr/local/Cellar/libffi/3.0.13... Uninstalling /usr/local/Cellar/pkg-config/0.28...…
OK, so when I left off last time, I was running into a gruesome link error. I found this Stack Overflow thread and the first accepted answer fixed the problem. However, it seems that the answer may be to avoid MacPorts versions of the libraries I need. So I'm going to attempt to clean that all out and use Homebrew. So, first: sudo port -fp uninstall --follow-dependents installed And then I'm…
So, I have some time today to program and I want to see how far I can get in starting to develop a GUI for my game, incomplete as it is. Can I get a window displayed and reacting to mouse or keyboard events, and drive the game logic with it? I came across the paper FranTk -- A Declarative GUI Language for Haskell (PDF file link) by Meurig Sage and it looked interesting, so I considered trying…
Jeff Licquia has been playing further with the code and so have I. He discovered a bug in the version I posted in yesterday's installment (my bad). In slide' I neglected to call slide' in the recursive version of slide' but called the existing non-monadic slide. In other words, I had: slide' ( t : Empty : ts ) = noscore ( Empty : ( slide ( t : ts ) ) ) The problem here is that we'll add nothing to…
The job search has eaten my brain for the last few days -- have I mentioned yet that I need a job? Oh, yes, I believe I may have -- but I'm taking some time to press on with my Haskell larnin', especially since I've been getting great, helpful feedback. The first thing I did was make some minor fixes to the list implementation, as suggested by Jeff. It's working now and my version looks like this:…
So, a little more progress in learning me a Haskell: I've managed to implement the board using an immutable array. There's good news and bad news here. If you're an old hand at functional programming, you probably know all this and more, but I needed to do a little thinking on purely functional data structures. I have not really been satisfied with the amount of code necessary to manage my 2-D…
So, just a quick update today. While I was cooking bacon this morning I looked at comments and tried to implement an idea I had last night. Roland suggested I could get rid of Edge . I had already been asking myself this. Using a special flag value for the edge-of-board case came from the Objective-C version where I wanted to avoid reading tiles outside the bounds of the board array. When using…
OK, things are getting meaty: I've made some minor modifications to World : data World = World { wBoard :: Board, wPenguinPos :: Pos, wPenguinDir :: Dir, wHeartCount :: Int } deriving (Show) This extracts the sequence of tiles in front of the penguin, for various directions, from a nested list representation of the board: view :: Board -> Pos -> Dir -> [Tile] view board pos East = ( drop ( posX…
More phone interviews, more coding. On my laptop, amidst a gaggle of fighting children, during a thunderstorm, with our basement flooding, with the kind assistance of some friendly commentors, a little more progress. Let's change Pos data Pos = Pos { posY :: Int, posX :: Int } deriving (Show, Eq) And define a game world: data World = World { board :: Board, penguinPos :: Pos, penguinDir :: Dir,…
Another short day since I had several phone interviews. Thanks to the folks who left comments! I got a little further today; I feel like I'm starting to understand Haskell's data handling a little bit better. It's a cliché but I think the hard part is un-learning, and understanding what something like this doesn't do. So here's where it stands now -- not finished by any means, but coming along,…
So if you've been following recent posts, you know I've been messing with the logic for a simple sliding-tile game. In my last post I took some designs refined via a side trip into Dylan and brought them back into Objective-C, making them a little more idiomatic by pruning my tile classes that didn't hold their weight, and compensating for Objective-C's very limited method dispatch options. But in…
I've been a little sick -- maybe something in our water, because our tap water started tasting like hose water -- but it seems to be clearing up. There's nothing like having flu-like symptoms to celebrate the first couple of days of summer! But I'm more-or-less back on my feet, although still a little queasy. Yesterday the weather station closest to our home in Saginaw hit 93, "feels like 100"…
So with some assistance from the folks on the Dylan Hackers mailing list I got enough clues to press on and get my Dylan implementation of the Polar game working, at least up through the end of the first board. I haven't verified that every possible tile interaction works yet, but it's a start. This seems like a silly problem, but it interests me because of several problems. Dispatch (or simulated…
Yesterday my wife took the kids with her on an overnight trip to Ann Arbor so I've had a bit of extra quiet time. How am I making use of this bounty? Getting on with some minor home repairs? Cleaning my office from top to bottom? Er, no... porting the game logic I've written so far in Objective-C back to Dylan, so that I can do some more thinking about it. So after a phone job interview yesterday…
(Warning: non-FP content). (I've been including this for the benefit of any "Planet X" aggregators who are including my feed, where X is a functional language like Haskell. I'm assuming you've got that by now and either don't care or are unsubscribing/ignoring this series if it bothers you. I expect to get back to more functional language code at some point, maybe even implementing the same…
(Warning: more non-FP content) It's time to get the board representation filled out with a real board. I've only got a couple of hours left before I have to pack up my computer to leave my Undisclosed Location, but let's see if I can get a little more done. Let's review what level 1 looks like: Level layouts are taken from the original Macintosh Polar game created by Go Endo. These were originally…
(Warning: non-FP content) So, this is day 5 in my Undisclosed Location and I haven't gotten much done -- I'm still engaged in a job search, and spent about eight hours working on a "take-home test" for an employer (with a few interruptions), and I'm pursuing more leads, and I'm trying to socialize with my hosts occasionally, so there are some distractions. But I've got enough information to go on…
(Warning: non-FP content) So today I'm working on chapter 3 in iOS Programming . This is about memory management. I have vague memories of manual reference-counting using retain and release in earlier experiments with Objective-C, but this book teaches ARM (Automatic Reference Counting). You enable ARM when you configure an XCode project of iOS. The idea behind object references (well, pointers in…
(Warning: more non-FP content). So I'm in an undisclosed location away from home specifically to spend a few quiet days focusing on programming. I had a goal to teach myself enough iOS programming to get a small demo app submitted to the app store by the end of the week. I'm not sure I'll manage that, but I'm learning. I have 3 relevant books with me: iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide…
(Warning: some non-FP content!) So yesterday I had a job interview for a developer position and I got the chance to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak, about my C and C++ programming skills. I was asked to write 3 functions given specifications including their prototypes, and to review a piece of C++ sample code. The interviewers left me alone with some paper for fifteen minutes or so.…
I am beginning an investigation of Scala. I have been a little bit disdainful of languages implemented on the JVM – but some of that disdain goes back to some impressions gained with much, much earlier versions of the JVM, plagued with various memory leaks. And I’m not a big fan of Java, having used it in anger enough to get to know its downsides in depth. But – the JVM seems to have improved…
Wow, it has been a long time since I've had anything to say on this particular blog. Another baby (we're at four now) will do that to a guy, I guess. I was going to do a little exploratory coding tonight, and so installed XCode, then MacPorts, then tried to install GHC. MacPorts tells me (after installing most of the components) that "ghc is not yet supported on Mac OS X 10.6.x (SnowLeopard)." I…
I've sort of let this blog lie fallow while my attention was distracted by having a new baby, playing shiny guitars, twittering, making podcasts and YouTube videos, and other distracting things. I am excited to see that Real World Haskell has gone to press, and so I am reading the electronic edition while waiting for the print edition to arrive. I had read some of the draft chapters, but it has…