(Yet Another) Conway's Game of Life
Written in Fennel for the web
An interactive web-based implementation of Conway's Game of Life, available here.
It's written in Fennel, a Lisp that compiles to Lua code, which is then run in a browser by Fengari, a Lua interpreter written in JavaScript.
Why?
- Excuse to learn a Lisp
- Functional languages such as Lisp derivatives model these sorts of simulations nicely
- Part of it is groundwork for something else I want to build
- The actual project is a massive undertaking
- I can get something else that looks neat in the meantime with minimal extra work
Thoughts on Fennel
Fennel itself is a very nice Lisp veneer over top of Lua. It seamlessly integrates with existing Lua code, including well-established libraries. My main gripes with it come directly from Lua's semantics:
- Having to explicitly use iterators (
pairs/ipairs) to iterate over things can be annoying - The ability to invoke undefined behaviour by poking at a list wrong is frustrating
- Minimal built-in higher-order functions
The latter point could be seen as a feature, as it allows you to choose your own preferred higher-order function library. There are built-in map and reduce/fold variants, but they require you use the long-winded iterator (pairs/ipairs) pattern.
I haven't explored the macro system at all yet.