CodeWorld: A web-based programming environment using a variant of Haskell | Hacker News Reader

CodeWorld: A web-based programming environment using a variant of Haskell

codeworld.info

35 pointstombenner5 comments

Reminds me of Elm: http://elm-lang.org/ Example: http://elm-lang.org/edit/examples/Intermediate/Pong.elm

Looks like they took Haskell and added parenthesis to it so as to make it more friendly to those only familiar with traditional imperative languages. I wonder how much that might alleviate confusion for new users.

I'd say "languages with Algol-inspired syntax" rather than "traditional imperative languages". There's some overlap between the two, of course, but there are declarative languages with more Algol-style syntax (e.g., Prolog) and imperative languages without it (e.g., Smalltalk).

Also, does the adding parentheses make it anything other than legal (if ugly) Haskell? It looks to me like just anti-idiomatic Haskell where all the functions are defined to take tuples instead of being in the more idiomatic curried form?

That's exactly what it is. It's all Haskell, just with tuples as arguments. If you want normal Haskell back, just do this:

    {-# LANGUAGE NoImplicitPrelude #-}
    import HaskellPrelude
    import CodeWorld  -- for pictures, colors, etc.

The stuff from CodeWorld is still uncurried, but the rest of the language is still there.

At some point after I first saw this post, "Google" got prepended to the title. I find this misleading since "CodeWorld is an unofficial project. It is not an official Google project, and Google provides no support for it."[1]

[1]https://github.com/google/codeworld

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