Thursday, November 28, 2013

Reactive-banana-SDL on Hackage!

I've uploaded to Hackage the reactive-banana-sdl library. This library was developed by R. Kyle Murphy(orclev), and I've just added a couple of functions and some documentation in the code. Orclev didn't want to maintain it anymore so I've taken the maintainer role, but I'm certainly not a FRP expert (in fact I started to use the library to learn about FRP), so be gentle...

I have a little typing game called TypeClass, which uses the library. You can have a look at the code, it may help you get started.

There's not that much there, but hopefully this can be of use to some people, and let me know what goodies we could add!

Happy Reactive SDL Hacking!

Thursday, November 07, 2013

Acme editor for Haskell development?

 A post on reddit made me discover the Oberon system and the Acme editor, that drew inspiration from it. There is a cool video on YouTube of the Acme editor in action. The concept that "everything is Text" and "every bit of text can be an executable action" looks really powerful, even if it looks like it would take a bit of practice to get used to the mouse chording and the intensive usage of the three mouse buttons.

Working with an IDE that's quite heavy (understatement of the year), I'm certainly drawn to that simplicity and power much more than to other editors like Emacs and Vi, where it seems you have to remember an near-infinite list of arcane key combinations to be productive.

So I'm wondering, are there people out there using Acme or Oberon or Plan 9 for Haskell development? How do you find it? What good ideas could be applicable to other environments? I'm always looking out for ways to improve EclipseFP and Haskell development tools in general, is this a path worth exploring?
I've seen that blog entry, from somebody apparently using Erlang, and I noticed the following: Other sacrifices are syntax highlighting, automatic indentation, specific language support. Is that true? Isn't there a way to add syntax highlighting in Acme? And I suppose the specific language support you get by exposing your tool via the Acme system for text commands...

Happy Haskell Hacking, on Acme or not!