Henk-Jan van Tuyl commenting Andrew Coppin
... (about HOpenGL and H.Platform) ...
Uh... yes, you might be right about that. However, AFAIK you still
need something with which to create a rendering surface in the first
place. (Not sure if HP includes GLUT...)
As you can see in the HP documentation at
http://lambda.haskell.org/hp-tmp/docs/2011.2.0.0/index.html
, both OpenGL and GLUT are present.
Or simply download and execute the examples before raising doubts...
(the Haskell translation of the NeHe tutorials, etc.) No need for
speculation.
Now, I have a personal pedagogical comment.
A few months ago I gave to some 30 students an assignment (a family of,
with freely chosen variants). A long one, to complete in 2 months or
more, and the subject was - the implementation, coding and running some
nice 3D scenes with HOpenGL. I teach Haskell for years, usually the
projects, which should be "applied" are devoted to some exercices in AI
/ games, compilation, text processing, graph manipulation, lazy
numerics, etc., you know the song. This time I decided to propose
something more visual.
The results? A true DISASTER!
They did "something", all of them, and all their realisations were the
nec plus ultra of mediocrity... Since my students were as clever and
laborious as always, and I didn't drink much vodka during this process,
I asked them what happened? The short "standard" assignments went
smoothly as always...
The answers (concentrated) were as follows:
The OpenGL bindings in Haskell are hardly "functional". You make us
sweat with generic functional patterns, laziness, exquisite typing,
non-determinism monad, parsing tools, etc., and then you throw us into
this ugly imperativism ! Nobody liked your assignment, it was no
pleasure for us, and our results are the consequence thereof. Where is
Haskell?? Of course, we had to execute the typical syntactic gymnastics,
but without understanding the functioning of all those "variables", and
other stuff relevant to the stateful OpenGL engine. Perhaps, if we had
before a semester of OpenGL, and at least two months of a true
course/tutorial (not your pseudo-tutorial on the Web...) we could be
more productive.
That's it...
I don't want to generalize, but there is a huge work to do in this context.
All the best.
Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France
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