[racket-users] My son's game in Racket
We released my 10 year old son's game that was done in Racket: www.1k3c.comhttp://www.1k3c.com I'm still taking a little heat from my wife for using an obscure language instead of something mainstream that is broadly used in industry, but I have nothing but good things to say about using Racket and DrRacket for a beginning programmer, and highly recommend it. I can't recommend 2htdp/universe for this sort of thing, though. I had to drop to the native GUI bitmaps for performance reasons, hack around the lifecycle to support a separate editor window, and I still don't know how to make the Quit menu item actually exit the app on the Mac version. I completely understand the reasoning for the way 2htdp/universe is built, and saying that a real project should use the grown-up APIs is fine, but the evolution from making a little animation to controlling it somehow to fleshing it out into a game is so natural that recommending a fairly big rewrite is unfortunate. I'm a big booster of functional programming, but I'm not sure that the functional drawing paradigm ever really sank in while my son was working with it, rather it felt like you just drew everything backwards with missing parenthesis at the end. I suspect that using the standard imperative GUI drawing code will make perfect sense to him. I'm not sure yet if we are going to migrate to the regular GUI code for upcoming work, or jump all the way to OpenGL so he can learn the joys of Why is the screen all black? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
RE: [racket-users] My son's game in Racket
The performance problems were related to the larger scrolling worlds. The H2DP versions got slower the more clouds were in the maps. As an aside, what drove the 20-something fps tic rate for H2DP, versus 30 for an every-other-vsync update? He is already through Algebra 2, so he gets functions. He didn't have any difficulty applying the functional image model, but when you have 20 lines of text drawing composed together, it really looks like you are just drawing things one after another, but backwards. The cases where it has value, like building a character up out of multiple things, then placing it somewhere in the world, tend to be the minority of operations compared to just drawing independent elements on the screen. My wife managed programmers for years, and she has opinions about pragmatic developers, which usually involve Java or C++. I tend to think that worrying about our 10 year old's future career prospects is a bit premature, and want to focus on developing abstract programming skills. :-) Unity/C# can be incredibly rewarding, but the entire ecosystem almost drives you away from programming as a beginner -- find the right script on the asset store and figure out how to configure it in the editor, rather than reinventing the wheel and writing it yourself. One of the non-obvious things that I think is beneficial with DrRacket is that it has an approachable complexity level. Dropping a newbie into Eclipse or MonoDevelop makes them feel like they are walking around in a byzantine museum, afraid to touch things, while DrRacket feels closer to old-school personal computers where you felt like you were in command of the machine. -Original Message- From: Matthias Felleisen [mailto:matth...@ccs.neu.edu] Sent: Monday, August 24, 2015 12:18 PM To: John Carmack Cc: Racket Users Subject: Re: [racket-users] My son's game in Racket Thanks for sharing. You can let Ryan know that he has his first grandma user, and in that mode, I managed to get a few extra lives. A couple of comments: -- In the past, some teachers have shared similar 'world/universe' games with me with similar performance. -- If your son is in middle school, he should see pre-algebra soon, and you may wish to revisit the initial drafts of the game then. You can show directly how pre-algebra applies and how the game is basically written in pre-algebra. -- Learning FP and the connection to math may work better if you actually use the design recipe from HtDP [2e]. I know of a child who worked through this book between the ages of 8 and 12 and had a grand time with math and programming then. -- And finally, I am curious about your wife's comment. What's so objectionable to learning fundamentals first and commercial things when you need to go professional? Your son used C#/Unity last year. Was it much easier? I have acknowledged the lack of a growth path from 'world' to a performant model in the past, and I will continue to admit the problem. -- Matthias -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [racket-users] My son's game in Racket
On Aug 24, 2015, at 12:27 PM, John Carmack jo...@oculus.com wrote: We “released” my 10 year old son’s game that was done in Racket: www.1k3c.com I’m still taking a little heat from my wife for using an obscure language instead of something mainstream that is broadly used in industry, but I have nothing but good things to say about using Racket and DrRacket for a beginning programmer, and highly recommend it. I can’t recommend 2htdp/universe for this sort of thing, though. I had to drop to the native GUI bitmaps for performance reasons, hack around the lifecycle to support a separate editor window, and I still don’t know how to make the Quit menu item actually exit the app on the Mac version. I completely understand the reasoning for the way 2htdp/universe is built, and saying that a “real” project should use the grown-up APIs is fine, but the evolution from making a little animation to controlling it somehow to fleshing it out into a game is so natural that recommending a fairly big rewrite is unfortunate. I’m a big booster of functional programming, but I’m not sure that the functional drawing paradigm ever really sank in while my son was working with it, rather it felt like you just drew everything backwards with missing parenthesis at the end. I suspect that using the standard imperative GUI drawing code will make perfect sense to him. I’m not sure yet if we are going to migrate to the regular GUI code for upcoming work, or jump all the way to OpenGL so he can learn the joys of “Why is the screen all black?” Thanks for sharing. You can let Ryan know that he has his first grandma user, and in that mode, I managed to get a few extra lives. A couple of comments: -- In the past, some teachers have shared similar 'world/universe' games with me with similar performance. -- If your son is in middle school, he should see pre-algebra soon, and you may wish to revisit the initial drafts of the game then. You can show directly how pre-algebra applies and how the game is basically written in pre-algebra. -- Learning FP and the connection to math may work better if you actually use the design recipe from HtDP [2e]. I know of a child who worked through this book between the ages of 8 and 12 and had a grand time with math and programming then. -- And finally, I am curious about your wife's comment. What's so objectionable to learning fundamentals first and commercial things when you need to go professional? Your son used C#/Unity last year. Was it much easier? I have acknowledged the lack of a growth path from 'world' to a performant model in the past, and I will continue to admit the problem. -- Matthias -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [racket-users] My son's game in Racket
2015-08-24 18:27 GMT+02:00 John Carmack jo...@oculus.com: We “released” my 10 year old son’s game that was done in Racket: www.1k3c.com Tell him, he has done a great job. It has the right game feel. I liked both how the levels progressed slowly in difficulty and that there were so many of them. /Jens Axel -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [racket-users] My son's game in Racket
FYI, I think the Mac version is out of date. Dropbox says the mac installer file is two weeks old, and the windows version is a few hours old. On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 12:27 PM, John Carmack jo...@oculus.com wrote: We “released” my 10 year old son’s game that was done in Racket: www.1k3c.com I’m still taking a little heat from my wife for using an obscure language instead of something mainstream that is broadly used in industry, but I have nothing but good things to say about using Racket and DrRacket for a beginning programmer, and highly recommend it. I can’t recommend 2htdp/universe for this sort of thing, though. I had to drop to the native GUI bitmaps for performance reasons, hack around the lifecycle to support a separate editor window, and I still don’t know how to make the Quit menu item actually exit the app on the Mac version. I completely understand the reasoning for the way 2htdp/universe is built, and saying that a “real” project should use the grown-up APIs is fine, but the evolution from making a little animation to controlling it somehow to fleshing it out into a game is so natural that recommending a fairly big rewrite is unfortunate. I’m a big booster of functional programming, but I’m not sure that the functional drawing paradigm ever really sank in while my son was working with it, rather it felt like you just drew everything backwards with missing parenthesis at the end. I suspect that using the standard imperative GUI drawing code will make perfect sense to him. I’m not sure yet if we are going to migrate to the regular GUI code for upcoming work, or jump all the way to OpenGL so he can learn the joys of “Why is the screen all black?” -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [racket-users] My son's game in Racket
Or something like this, with the rackjure package: (require rackjure/threading 2htdp/image) (~ background-img (place-image image-1 x y) ; the background-img will be inserted as the last argument, because that's what ~ does (place-image image-2 x y) ; the background + image-1 will be inserted as the last argument (place-image image-3 x y) ; and so on ...) Or if you don't want to use rackjure, then with let* it would be: (let* ([img background-img] [img (place-image image-1 x y img)] [img (place-image image-2 x y img)] [img (place-image image-3 x y img)] ...) img) On Aug 24, 2015, at 2:40 PM, Joel McCracken mccracken.j...@gmail.com wrote: This would be where I would reach for a let* to handle intermediate results, because code like this is very awkward. On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 2:32 PM, John Carmack jo...@oculus.com wrote: The idea that you functionally compose images like this: (place-image image-1 x y (place-image image-2 x y (place-image image-3 x y))) Which draws image1 on top of image2 on top of image 3, which is backwards from the painters order that would draw image 3, then image 2, then image 1. This imperative, side-effect-ing code is a little less clear to a beginner with the OOP and DC concepts, but It better represents what actually happens, and it is much easier to modify the code without worrying about the nesting. (send dc draw-bitmap imag3 x y) (send dc draw-bitmap imag2 x y) (send dc draw-bitmap imag1 x y) -Original Message- From: racket-users@googlegroups.com [mailto:racket-users@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of David Grenier Sent: Monday, August 24, 2015 1:14 PM To: Racket Users Cc: John Carmack Subject: [racket-users] Re: My son's game in Racket On Monday, August 24, 2015 at 12:28:07 PM UTC-4, John Carmack wrote: We “released” my 10 year old son’s game that was done in Racket: www.1k3c.com I’m still taking a little heat from my wife for using an obscure language instead of something mainstream that is broadly used in industry, but I have nothing but good things to say about using Racket and DrRacket for a beginning programmer, and highly recommend it. I can’t recommend 2htdp/universe for this sort of thing, though. I had to drop to the native GUI bitmaps for performance reasons, hack around the lifecycle to support a separate editor window, and I still don’t know how to make the Quit menu item actually exit the app on the Mac version. I completely understand the reasoning for the way 2htdp/universe is built, and saying that a “real” project should use the grown-up APIs is fine, but the evolution from making a little animation to controlling it somehow to fleshing it out into a game is so natural that recommending a fairly big rewrite is unfortunate. I’m a big booster of functional programming, but I’m not sure that the functional drawing paradigm ever really sank in while my son was working with it, rather it felt like you just drew everything backwards with missing parenthesis at the end. I suspect that using the standard imperative GUI drawing code will make perfect sense to him. I’m not sure yet if we are going to migrate to the regular GUI code for upcoming work, or jump all the way to OpenGL so he can learn the joys of “Why is the screen all black?” Not clear what was meant both times you wrote backwards are you referring to the lisp-style function call? Something that could be alleviated by say F#'s pipe forward operator? let (|) a f = f a or Clojure's - macro? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=https://groups.google.com/d/optoutk=ZVNjlDMF0FElm4dQtryO4A%3D%3D%0Ar=Kjg6LltY9QjkipKooaVldA%3D%3D%0Am=HArZE0M9OqU4wspKLzQzG6N5gO9ncSxPP9qVzkUgoVU%3D%0As=b451faca736dc42c554f148983e7279865ef32be9ddf2df75f5c88c15dd34a73. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
Re: [racket-users] My son's game in Racket
On Aug 24, 2015, at 11:32 AM, John Carmack jo...@oculus.com wrote: The idea that you functionally compose images like this: (place-image image-1 x y (place-image image-2 x y (place-image image-3 x y))) Which draws image1 on top of image2 on top of image 3, which is backwards from the painters order that would draw image 3, then image 2, then image 1. This imperative, side-effect-ing code is a little less clear to a beginner with the OOP and DC concepts, but It better represents what actually happens, and it is much easier to modify the code without worrying about the nesting. (send dc draw-bitmap imag3 x y) (send dc draw-bitmap imag2 x y) (send dc draw-bitmap imag1 x y) Working with my children and first-year students I see this problem all the time; probably at least half of the kids I work with feel this way. After thinking about it a bit, though, I see that the fundamental problem here isn’t functional vs. imperative; it has to do with operator order. So, for instance, I claim that my students would be (relatively) happy if they got to write ((image3 place-image x y image2) place-image x y image1) I don’t have a good answer here—many people have tried to build infix syntax for Scheme Racket, and none of them has yet caught on. Perhaps Alex Knauth’s macro is the right thing, but what’s really needed (it seems to me) is a solution with widespread acceptance. John -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [racket-users] My son's game in Racket
On Monday, August 24, 2015 at 5:43:38 PM UTC, John Carmack wrote: He didn't have any difficulty applying the functional image model, but when you have 20 lines of text drawing composed together, it really looks like you are just drawing things one after another, but backwards. (define (pipe . d) (apply compose (reverse d))) ;-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [racket-users] My son's game in Racket
On Aug 24, 2015, at 3:40 PM, François Beausoleil francois.beausol...@gmail.com wrote: Le lundi 24 août 2015 12:28:07 UTC-4, John Carmack a écrit : ... Hello John, Thanks for sharing. Played a few levels and had fun :) I have a 10 year old daughter. Did your son show interest in programming or did you initiate him yourself? I remember I started when I was 10 years old as well. I'd like to introduce my daughter to programming too, and was wondering when the right time would be. I tried Logo last year, but after 5 minutes, she didn't see any interest in it. Have a great day! François Beausoleil -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. Francois, since you are on the Racket mailing list, may I recommend the Bootstrap material? It is a restricted version of the Universe approach as John calls it, tailored to 10-12 year olds who are just finding out about expressions and functions (in the US. Does not apply to my experience with European schools.) You can play with this in DrRacket off-line or if you prefer you can use WeScheme as an on-line tool with this approach. The point is to reinforce math (a traditional school topic) with programming and to use this kind of programming as a gateway for real programming (in a mostly functional style. None of us are purists; we are American pragmatists.) See bootstrap-world.org -- Matthias -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Racket Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
