Re: [Haskell-cafe] [reactive] A pong and integrate

Wow... impressive... And now, with your experience, if you'd have to do this again, would you use Yampa or stick up with C#/C++ ? 2010/5/24 Peter Verswyvelen

Yeah. Funny that we're still writing games in C++, while mission critical and hard real time systems are written in much nicer languages :)

I made something similar to Lucid Synchrone for a game company I used to work, but with the purpose of making reactive programming accessible to computer artists. The integrated development environment provided the typical boxes-and-links user interface, where the boxes were signal functions. Signals itself were not exposed, like Yampa. The system did type inference so artists never really had to deal with types. Special nodes like feedback and delay where provided to allow transferring values to the next frame. This actually was a great success, digital artists could literally create little interactive applications with it, without much help from programmers. This resulted in a Playstation 3 visual experience "Mesmerize" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW7qGhBjwhY). This was before I knew Haskell or functional programming, so it was hacked together in C# and C++...

I still believe that the reason why computers artists could work with this environment and were not able to learn imperative programming is functional programming itself: the system had all the goodies of FP: type inference, referential transparancy, etc... But is also provided the possibility to edit literals while the simulation was running, providing zero turnaround times, which was equally important for quick adoption of the software.

So IMO Haskell and FRP systems have a huge potential for education of a much broader audience than just computer scientists...

On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 6:13 PM, Limestraël wrote:

...

I assumed also that it was a field which was still under research, however, Lustre, again, is used "for critical control software in aircraft, helicopters, and nuclear power plants", according to wikipedia.