Bruce Hauman
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2015–2020
6:22 · 55K views · Apr 29, 2014
Bruce Hauman live-codes Flappy Bird in ClojureScript in about six minutes, using figwheel to hot-reload changes into the running game. The demo shows game behavior being changed interactively without restarting.
It is the canonical demo HN people cite for live interactive development and hot reloading, as proof the workflow is real and not smoke and mirrors.
9 comments from Hacker News
I don't disagree with the article, but I also don't know that pushing the boundaries of interactivity and "fun" are relegated to academia. Iterating on what makes things fun is (probably) highly unscientific and might be better left to people more focused on it directly, such as game programmers. As far as interactive development of games goes, I still marvel at Bruce Hauman's demo[1] of "Interactive programming Flappy Bird in ClojureScript". I think the best hope of achieving what the author is suggesting is in the development of something similar, either direct REPL access to the game environment or DSLs embedded in the game engines (which already exist I'm sure). Outside of the big name engines, I'm curious about what existing options are (leaving out anything browser based because JavaScript is an obvious example), I know of LÖVE[2] but I'm not familiar with how "fun" games made in it are. [1]: this video [2]: [LINK]
From my standpoint as a one man show, it's invaluable to be able to write the web client and backend in the same language, to share code between them... and have that one language NOT be JS. Clojurescript with Rum/Citrus or Reagent/Reframe deliver on the promise of React/Redux with much less fuss and overhead. Editing JSX is a pain in comparison to the Hiccup syntax used more often in CLJS, e.g. [:div {:class shiny} "some stuff" [:button "OK"]] - with the structural editing in any good Clojure editor you can cut, paste, entire blocks of tags, or slurp a tag from outside your div into it, or spit one out, all with a few keystrokes, never stopping to find some closing </div> tag.. I guess some JSX IDEs might do this, but it's really nice that the HTML is represented as just another piece of data, not some weird chimerical syntax bolt on. With Figwheel or ShadowCLJS hot reloading is instantaneous and doesn't even interrupt your webapp. If they're written properly, functions and the app state are not conflated at all, so you can modify any function in your app's rendering or behavior and as long as they aren't incompatible with the runtime state, it will just pop right into your browser. Illustrated well in this video where the author is interactively re-implementing Flappy Bird: this video I feel particularly strongly about this having started out doing front end work primarily in cljs but recently being falling into using React/Redux for a contract and being REALLY strung out by t
I'm not sure if the parent did, but I followed what you were looking for and the answer is still "try clojure", perhaps more specifically it is "Try the Clojure libraries figwheel and devcards to do web stuff" but the push for immediate feedback and "interactive programming" is central for everyone. It's a community that took Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk to heart, already agreeing due to the REPL centric workflows that most people used. Bruce Hauman has some good talks about his tools, which are GUI application-centric and a joy to use [1][2][3] If you aren't doing web or native mobile GUI stuff then the default tools have immediate unit test/linting/spec compliance feedback triggered every time you save a file. Unless you mean you want a very simplified language, in which case you should look elsewhere. Clojure has definitely chosen the high power side of that trade-off, but this also allows some truly first class tools to be developed. [1] [LINK] [2] this video [3] [LINK] <- this one in particular is original and outstanding in my opinion
This is called interactive development; if you liked this, check these out: * Interactive programming Flappy Bird in ClojureScript: this video * Live-editing React app without refresh: [LINK] These demos aren't smoke and mirrors, I and many others do interactive development, 8 hours a day, writing regular web apps.
If you're starting from from scratch it looks really awesome. No callback hell and in believable tooling. Watch these talks to see what I mean about tooling: Few minutes this video Longer [LINK]