Yeah, I got that feeling too, when time measurements are in the microsecond range. I wonder how CPU cache and memory access patterns affect the results.
i) The government throws its hands in the air and gives up.
ii) The government cuts off the entire building/complex.
iii) The government cuts off people entirely at random.
Knowing the way most governments tend to work, my money is on number 3, with number 2 coming in a distant second.
Would a beginner be able to pick up this book easily?
Would someone who knows of/about functional languages but not used them be able to pick up this book easily?
He says its taken him a week to do it and has had to ask lots of people for help. So I'd say its much harder than in a language like C#. I could (and so could most other people here) make tetris in 1-2 days without help.
This is a blog about functional languages, so this man obviously knows a lot about Haskell but still required help for a game that would be prettymuch a hello world for someone in almost any other language.
I know nothing of your abilities, even so, if haskell is the only language you know well, I'd be impressed if you could make the game as fast as me or most ppl here.
The first paragraph of the post explains, "it’s my first, real foray into Haskell."
If your first real program in any language was a Tetris game, you'd probably need some help getting started too.
As shown by the various games posted elsewhere in this thread, there are perfectly trivial and straightforward ways to write games in Haskell. If nothing else, Haskell's "do notation" makes it easy to safely mix imperative programming with pure functional programming.
When people do post about writing a game in a new language as a notable achievement, it's usually because they did it in part to learn a new language (as in this case) or a new concept (like using FRP or Erlang-style message passing, instead of imperative programming with mutable state).
Sorry, I missed that sentence, yes you're right. I read the bit to the right of the blog and the blog title which give the impression that he was experienced with Haskell.
But the thing is, functional game development techniques are nowhere near as developed or established as those of OO game development. The solutions to the problems at hand aren't as immediately obvious.
All this hinges on the fact that functional languages are only now being appreciated: functional languages seem to be popping up like daisies now either via stand-alone languages such as F#, multiparadigm languages or even in OOP languages (I believe I read somewhere that C# is integrating ideas from the functional paradigm). Still I can't pretend that any functional language has so far become as remotely popular as say Java or C++. Due to this the work done on functional programming and games is quite a niche area which is often explored to do a fun project while learning a language.
As far as I know there is nothing non-trivial that I had to use apart from introducing state when it was needed by the game via monads and muteable variables. At first they were tricky because I was used to taking such things for granted.
What I can tell you is that the backend (which really needs no state) is much more easier to write in Haskell IMHO.
If terrorists have already taken down the network, what's the point of an ID card or any of the billions spent on increasing our "safety"....?
On that subject, has anyone done the numbers on the number of people that would be saved by putting the same money spent on anti-terror bullshit into the NHS vs the number of people saved from terrorism?
The intent isn't (purely) anti-terrorism. It's an effort towards reducing things like benefit fraud, too. So any success from the card reduces these kind of budget 'leaks.'
Try writing the software for a piece of hardware that is still being developed without everyone in the same place. it would be hell!
Language barriers, misunderstandings, the fact some things are just plain difficult to express, slow turn arounds, having incomplete specs and expressing which parts are subject to change, maintainability after delivery, accountability and international law, the need for regular contact between hardware and software guys, points of contact - if things go dark in russia, how can i get in contact? Config issues- the software doesn't work on my pc...licensing issues, source code availability and ownership, ability and cost of making mods to the code years later, unknown skill/professionalism of offshore programmers, etc etc. But hey, it could be cheaper...right?
Haha, you have the opposite opinion of me, but you also pretty-much have the exact opposite experiences too. Maybe we both know a lot in our "main" subjects and think of all the underlying knowledge/related material is required to be useful, but in reality you can just pick up the knowledge you need on its own without any background knowledge on how it all works, you'll be confused when that stuff in mentioned or brought up, but if you stay in your niche you'll be fine.
A computer scientist can effectively analyse large volumes of biological data, I'm not convinced a biologist could do the same because there is just so much computer science related to visualisation, graphics programming and data modelling and their prerequisites.
A person who did 1/2 and 1/2 would likely not have enough knowledge or experience to do either the biology or cs side particularly well.
Not to mention, there are very few people I know who are good at both biology and cs.
I briefly looked it up, molecular biology would be a good fit though its pretty-much chemistry. It entirely depends on which areas are studied in biology.
