Pong (130 lines in Clojure)

http://jng.imagine27.com/articles/2009-09-12-122605_pong_in_clojure.html

by jayded • 17 years ago

46 9 17 years ago

jng.imagine27.com

jcw• 17 years ago

Just today I was tinkering with dreamscheme and its SDL hooks, thinking about writing a pong clone, wondering if it would gain any attention after Haskell pong has.

omouse• 17 years ago

Ugh, the code is ugly :/

francoisdevlin• 17 years ago

It could be cleaned up some, but due to all the awt interaction, it needs to be that way.

arb• 17 years ago

It's unnecessarily ugly.

There's a lot of unnecessary state, where refs are initialized to nil, then only updated to a fixed value. There's side effects in transactions (mostly around the Timer). Not one function is defined with parameters, which ought to raise alarms. The flow resembles Java code rewritten in Clojure, rather than a functional Clojure program.

Besides that, much of the code is either non-idiomatic or primitive: the 'ns' macro should be used instead of 'import'; 'alter' can be better than 'ref-set'; 'when' is better than 'if' without an else form; the proxy identation is wrong.

The AWT/Swing interaction is excusable, as is the poor readability given the brevity constraint for this exercise, but there are still some elementary problems.

llimllib• 17 years ago

In python, 30 lines: http://billmill.org/pong.html

(edit: I just mean to offer for comparison to this program, not in some sort of macho programming-language pissing contest sense.)

swannodette• 17 years ago

Of course this isn't much of a comparison at all :) You're using NodeBox to abstract away much of the pain of event handling and drawing to the screen. A more interesting and fair comparison would be something like using wxPython + pycairo.

cubicle67• 17 years ago

Interestingly, the original as written in zero lines of code (It was 'programmed' as a ttl logic circuit)

Pong (130 lines in Clojure)

Related Stories