Game of Life

In my previous post, I covered my adventures with a Lisp formerly known as DrScheme (Racket). Since Lisp has so much cred in the hacker community, I figured I would pick an equally credentialed problem for my Lisp program: Conway's Game of Life!

In my previous two follow-ups, I ended up talking about how I accomplished the task I set out to do, and "real-world" experiences I had when using the language. For better or for worse, all of the "real world" experiences I had using Racket have already been documented in the previous post! However, I did want to make sure and right some kind of follow-up, if only to post a link to the finished program:

https://github.com/hoelzro/language-of-the-month/tree/master/March-2016

There were two things I would like to mention that pertain to my program. The first was Racket's pict library, which I mentioned in passing in my previous post. The pict library provides a picture datatype and functions to manipulate picts which display directly in the REPL. This made implementing the game of life pretty easy to inspect, since all I had to do to view the grid was (grid->pict grid).

The second thing was the manner in which Racket encouraged me to implement the game of life. If you look at the code, you may find there's no rendering happening, or clock to determine how fast the game proceeds. That's because the only function for advancing the state of the game lives in a step function, which simply applies the rules and returns a new grid. This way, I could easily step through the various generations of the grid by repeatedly calling step on grid objects. I found this to be a very natural way to write the program, and it aided me in debugging a few times!

Playing around with Racket was a blast, and I have a feeling I'll revisit it in the future. That's all for this language of the month!