On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 1:19 AM, Jerzy Karczmarczuk <jerzy.karczmarc...@unicaen.fr> wrote: > 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.
Wow, this is great feedback! Thank you. I'm CC'ing the opengl list. > 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. I think the opengl bindings themselves should be have a level that closely matches the C API so that people can use famous books like the redbook to learn it. I wouldn't really expect us Haskellers to stop there though, as that's the OpenGLRaw library. I think we need something a bit higher level on top that lets you use non-FFI types. That's the OpenGL library. Then we need something that Haskellers *actually* use that provides resource loading, management, type typing etc. I think we need scene graphs and what have you. There is a summer of code student working on the OpenGL library part of it, or HGL as he likes to call it. I know someone else has been working on a scene graph / scene management library. I don't think the opengl creators meant for people to develop at that level. I think they really did mean for people to build "middleware" on top of it and I think that's what we in the Haskell community need to do. By the way, did you show your students gloss? http://hackage.haskell.org/package/gloss Thanks, Jason _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
