2048 in Idris | Hacker News Reader

2048 in Idris

github.com

84 pointssctb11 comments

Author here. Glad to see so many people interested.

I think people will find this useful as an example is programming in Idris. While there are many other resources around, this fills a niche as a fairly complete, self contained program.

Since I wrote it, I've noticed that my programming style is not very standard, especially my approach to proofs, so I'm still working on it.

Thanks for this - I've bookmarked it to read later. It looks like you've explained everything pretty thoroughly in the readme, and looks like an excellent example for getting started.

I'm new here. Is there a new language mentioned on Hacker News this frequently? I have skimmed the front page and seen at least a dozen or so being mentioned in the last month.

It doesn't seem too frequent to me, but I often hear of languages first here on HN.

Idris isn't all that new...

I think this past month has been a bit of an outlier with new languages, such as Avail, being posted. That said, I wouldn't count Idris as one of them - it's been around for a little while now, and in the community of people familiar with purely functional languages, it's probably about as well known as Elm or Agda: If talking to a Haskeller, there's a good chance they've at least heard of it.

Of course, it's all relative - this community does have a good number of early language adopters and people involved in programming language research. At the other end of the spectrum, just a few years ago, I met a Java developer who, at the time, hadn't even heard of C# - I'd imagine he'd've been quite shocked by the languages talked about here.

Compared to other darling languages like Go, Haskell and Rust, I think Idris has a comparatively low profile. It pops up occasionally, but not all that much. I'd be surprised if it was a dozen in a month.

Not as often as 2048 is mentioned.

2048 in 'x' is some kind of meme now. It would be nice to do a compilation of all these so you can compare the languages by various metrics.

Here is one comparison for 2048:

http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/24134/create-a-s...

I think the idea of comparing languages based on a variety of tasks is interesting. We've all seen "hello world" in many languages[1], but including other tasks (like 2048) would provide a much richer summary of the language. Thus, a language could be efficiently summarized by tuples of "complexity parameters:"

- lines of code - number of characters - total number of tokens - number of blank lines (which might approximate modularity) - ...etc

For example, using "hello world" and 2048 as code targets:

complexity("java", "num-characters") would yield: (115, 1269). complexity("python3", "num-characters") would yield: (25, 2048).

1: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Text

Demo somewhere?

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