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Purely Functional Retrogames

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75 pointsaycangulez13 comments

The actual post linked here is basically an intro and is kind of "meh" by itself, but the series of posts it introduces is quite good and answers a lot of the questions people have about how you do a seemingly "imperative-style" application in a purely functional language.

Yes. I also remember there being a previous discussion about those posts on HN. Does anybody care to dig it out?

I checked HNSearch, but I couldn't find one with more than a tiny handful of comments (I think with this comment we're already halfway to matching the most active one).

And don't limit yourself to discussions from just this particular post; many of his other posts have good threads here.

If you like this series of posts, get yourself a copy of The Haskell School of Expression [0]. It covers various multi-media applications of Haskell, including reactive animations.

[0]: http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/hudak/SOE/

What I would really love is a post--or series of posts--just like this, but using FRP so that everything could be purely functional. Perhaps something like this exists already?

1. Install reactive-banana and read its docs and Apfelmus' intro (i).

2. Write a simple, 80s-style game using it.

3. Write a short tutorial explaining it.

4. ???

5. Profit.

(i) http://apfelmus.nfshost.com/blog.html#functional-reactive-pr...

I might actually do that if I have time during the semester.

But I'm innately lazy and would love to have it done for me :P.

Besides, since I'll be learning how to use FRP, anything I write about it will be as a beginner with no experience. That said, a project like that would actually be perfect for the blog I keep meaning to start :)

The closest thing I could find to a tutorial (besides Apfelmus' posts) is this:

http://www.formicite.com/dopage.php?frp/frp.html

No time to check it in detail now, but at first sight it doesn't seem tutorial-ish enough.

If you're interested in doing something on the lines of the above, I'll do it with you. I'll drop you an email.

The following brief tutorial does not fit your criteria, but you might be interested in it anyway, as it is geared towards making games using FRP:

http://booki.flossmanuals.net/fluxus/frisbee/

Thanks.

My conclusion until now is, that FRP can look beautiful and expressive for manageable, simple problems, and ugly and hairy for complicated stuff.

These two are quite nice, the first one is the base of the second one:

https://github.com/leonidas/codeblog/blob/master/2012/2012-0...

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