r-wos.org

Today I learned: “Balls bouncing around in a cube” is not a good paradigm to build a programming language on. Let me explain. Some time ago, I tried to dive into genetic programming. Back then, I used Brainfuck as the underlying programming language – mainly because it’s very easy to generate Brainfuck code. Needless to…

What you see here is the prototype of a new esoteric programming language I’m currently working on. It’s much too late to go into details now, but today it printed its first output. 🙂 I’ll blog about the what, why and how tomorrow or so – for now, a screen shot must suffice: Cute, isn’t…

I proudly present: The whole experience of programming in PHP, condensed into just two lines. Two function definitions from PHP’s standard library: Yep.

First things first: What is purely functional programming? A simple definition that’ll do it for this exercise is this: As you can see from this definition, we can never do IO, never directly allocate memory, never write to files, never receive user input – which is quite a bit of a problem for a game,…

I’ve run head-first into the first big wall on my little OpenGL-Project. I was implementing a simple physics system, which triggered a much bigger problem: the general architecture of my game was crap. I knew that, but I didn’t know how to make it suck less. However, I think I have now found a solution.…

I just finished a part of the terrain-generator …well, let’s call it “the OpenGL project” that generates some three-dimensional primitives. I think the internal API is quite nice – though, admittedly I may be a bit biased… 🙂 If one wanted a sphere (there is no choice, really – spheres are the only primitives implemented…

That one was surprisingly easy, then hard, and eventually pretty easy again. In most GUI-frameworks, I think, one could have just used the normal text-on-canvas functions to draw some text on top of the OpenGL canvas. At least that’s what I had expected. Well, it doesn’t really work that way in Racket’s GUI framework. So,…

I just got my little terrain generator to render the first planets. The generated terrain is not yet very realistic, the “texture” is just a height-map and the poles (not pictured) look really bad. Still: success! I managed to get something involving sine and cosine to actually work, sort of. And I regained my sixth…

“You are missing some linker flag somewhere” translates to C++ as follows: There is no place in this world for a language like that. We have enough problems already. Stop. Using. C++. Use C, use Go, use a Lisp – heck, use C# or Java or Brainfuck. But please, please, please stop that C++ bullshit.…

I’m a bit disappointed by Common Lisp. I don’t know what I expected, but it’s not quite the language I would like it to be. It’s not that CL’s a bad language – it’s just so… ugly, really. For a Lisp at least. And a bit unfriendly, too. To beginners like me at least. An…