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Comment by leononame

3 months ago

Great read! Can anyone here recommend a good resource for learning Haskell that's in the style of "Text-Mode Games as First Haskell Projects"? Haskell has been on my radar since forever, and I've got some FP concepts internalized by making a side project in F#, but I have no idea what a monad really is and a fun prohect to code along might be perfect.

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leononame

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brabel  3 months ago

I've been learning Unison [1] and I highly recommend. It's a Haskell-like language, but with some really interesting ideas around how code should be managed and distributed. They also use use algebraic effects (represented with "abilities" in Unison) instead of Monads, which gives some interesting advantages [2].

[1] https://www.unison-lang.org/

[2] https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/fundamentals/abilities/for-...

  • tasuki  3 months ago

    Have you written anything in Unison yet? To me Unison feels extremely ahead of its time. They clearly thought things through and aren't afraid to challenge the status quo. Maybe a bit too much ahead of its time even...

    I fear `ucm` a little. You mean I can't version my things with git? How do I... ehh, do anything? And how is the deployment story if one chooses not to use the Unison cloud?

    • brabel  3 months ago

      To be honest, all I've done was try the weekly challenges that the Unison team publishes on Twitter :D

      I just like the very light syntax that it got from Haskell, but without the need for Monads and the "ugly" monad operators you need to juggle, replaced by abilities which IMHO are much more elegant.

      They are focusing on writing cloud-services and apparently their offering is already pretty good, so if I ever need a clouse service I am tempted to use Unison (for anything not very critical, at least until I gain confidence in it): https://www.unison.cloud/our-approach/

      And I love ucm and think it may be very close to what the future will look like (which is why I do agree it's ahead of our time). It's already possible to work with Unison but still have proper code review: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/tooling/project-workflows/#...

      Here's an example change: https://share.unison-lang.org/@unison/base/contributions/42/...

      But currently, I believe you do need to pull the branch locally and then load diffs with ucm into your favourite diff tool to properly see what's been changed (which is not ideal , and I believe they are working on making this easier, we'll see).

    • carbonatom  3 months ago

      Can you or someone else familiar with Unison tell us what specific things about Unison feel ahead of its time? I don't know Unison so these things will be a good motivation for me to learn Unison.

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kreyenborgi  3 months ago

https://learn-haskell.blog/

> In this book, we will implement a simple static blog generator in Haskell, converting documents written in our own custom markup language to HTML.

> We will:

    Implement a tiny HTML printer library
    Define and parse our own custom markup language
    Read files and glue things together
    Add command line arguments parsing
    Write tests and documentation

> In each chapter of the book, we will focus on a particular task we wish to achieve, and throughout the chapter, learn just enough Haskell to complete the task.

trealira  3 months ago

"Programming in Haskell" by Graham Hutton has a few small text mode games in the second half of the book: Nim, Hangman, the game of life, and Tic-Tac-Toe; and it walks you through the minimax algorithm. The author also implements a solution to the countdown problem, which is hard to explain, so as an example, you're given a sequence of numbers [1, 3, 7, 10, 25, 50] and the target 765; a correct solution is (1+50)*(25-10).

The first half of the book is more geared towards a newbie to functional programming in general.

tombert  3 months ago

Haven’t you heard? Monads are burritos!

In all seriousness, it’s not “text mode”, but one of the things that I felt really showed how cool Haskell and a friend could pure model could be a was Netwire and Functional Reactive Programming. It allowed me to design graphical applications the way I always wanted to instead of how they’re typically structured in imperative languages. There are lots of tutorials out there for making little games with it.

  • tombert  3 months ago

    Ugh, autocorrect and it's too late to edit.

    I was suggesting the Netwire library, an FRP library for Haskell.