Alright, for my Java class I had to create an original program, from conception to completion. I chose to create a poem generator. The result of that adventure is now before you. What this is a generator of arbitrary poems. It will make poems of several varieties about many different subjects. An example of a haiku about animals is shown below.
Pig locates leopard
A horse smacks rat from a gnat
A rat purrs from gnat
So I’ve finally gotten around to reading the book I picked up about Core Animation. The framework is quite neat and it does what it promises to do very well, as well as a whole lot more. My main interest in it is making interfaces and I’m looking forward to doing so later in the book.
The issue it has brought up though is just how verbose Objective-C really is, especially when you start to get deeper into it. The lack of namespaces really starts to show it’s toll.
I have spent the day messing with these two things (which for those who don’t know are an implementation of the Ruby language on top of the Objective-C runtime and can be found here) and I must say that they are quite amazing, in fact I’m going to go ahead and offer some speculation about the future of the project.
First though a bit about what it allows you to do. You can write programs in Ruby quickly and easily in gorgeous, and idiomatic Ruby.
Personally I think that as the project matures it will begin to replace Objective-C for application development on OS X, and Objective-C will just be used for Libraries. With Hotcocoa bindings things would be even easier. I plan to write a small app to try some of these things out.
So, this past two weeks I have been trying to learn Haskell. After messing with it for a while I have decided that it is quite an odd language. It’s purely functional, and lazy, which is more or less the exact opposite of most other languages out there (except the other lazy or functional ones of course). What I do like about it though is that it is very powerful and very expressive. I’m sure that one of these days I’ll wrap my head around Monads and as far as I’m aware that will be the most difficult part. I really like its type system and I wish that something that beautiful existed in any other language. Alas, it does not.
So I had this crazy idea for a video game the other day. It would be an MMO, but it would be slightly different than what’s currently out there. Basically it’d be a collaborative building game. People would work together to build towns and cities. Buildings would be built from the ground up. The basic idea is that there would be a way of creating blueprints, collaborating with others to build the first instance of a building which could then be rebuilt anywhere using the blueprints. Ideally, the building and designing process would be about as complicated as legos.
The Din 