This reminds me of a server app I saw recently in a language called
Clojure. Clojure is a relatively new lisp variant targeting the JVM,
and has a home-grown STM layer built into the language. Anyway, the
app I saw was a (admittedly didactic-focused) multi-threaded MUD
server (google "clojure mire"), which could easy serve as the
foundation for a project like this. Thus, I would say that STM is up
for the challenge. The question in my mind would be whether or not
Haskell's graphics/video libraries are mature enough.
On May 7, 2009, at 6:28 AM, Benjamin L.Russell
One question that has been coming up at the back of my mind for the past several weeks has been how difficult would it be to create a collaborative multi-user online virtual world application in Haskell.
More specifically, last August, I came across a very interesting application called Croquet (see http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page), which happens to be based on Squeak (see http://www.squeak.org/), a dialect of Smalltalk. Croquet, in turn, provides the basis for Cobalt (see http://www.duke.edu/~julian/Cobalt/Home.html), a "virtual workspace browser and construction toolkit for accessing, creating, and publishing hyperlinked multi-user virtual environments" (according to the home page for that project).
What struck me as especially interesting was how Croquet allows multiple users to collaborate together in a multi-user online virtual world in software development and other collaborative projects. As one application, the video clip on the upper-right-hand corner of the above-mentioned Croquet home page illustrates how a user can, by writing code from inside the application, create on-the-fly additional virtual environments, which can then be entered by either the programmer or other programmers. Other applications (shown in other video clips on the "Screenshots/Videos" page (see http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Screenshots/Videos) show alternative applications that include text-based annotations, a 3D spreadsheet, and writing a conventional blog from within a virtual world.
Unfortunately, Smalltalk is an object-oriented language. If possible, I would like to see something similar in a functional programming language such as Haskell.
Does anybody know whether duplicating this project in Haskell would be feasible?
-- Benjamin L. Russell -- Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/ Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725 "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^
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