Scrabble Helper is a simple shell program that accepts a series of letters, then displays a list of Scrabble words possible from those letters. I undertook this project as a first foray into Elixir and functional programming, and boy howdy was it rewarding! (And terrifying, but mostly rewarding.)
- First, I built the functionality in Ruby (easy peasy);
- Then, I tried to build the same functionality in Elixir (not so easy peasy).
Despite the simplicity of the functionality, Scrabble Helper was a real doozy—and ended up being a fantastic introduction to the terrifying-yet-wonderful world of functional programming. By trying to replicate my Ruby work in Elixir, I slammed right up against some of functional programming's most opinionated principles. That friction had me entirely rethinking both the problem, and my approach to programming in general—and dare I say it, I might be a functional programming convert in the making.
If you're interested in functional programming and don't quite know where to start, like me, please feel free to hit me up! I'm but a single step into this perilous journey, and I would love some companions to suffer learn with along the way.
Scrabble Helper requires a local installation of either Ruby or Elixir (or both).
After installing one or both of the above, follow these directions:
- Clone down this Scrabble Helper repository to your local machine, using the green Code button.
- Open a terminal session, and navigate to the Scrabble Helper repository.
- Within your terminal session, enter
chmod +x run_scrabble.shto enable permissions. - Finally, within your terminal session, enter
./run_scrabble.shto run the program.
To use Scrabble Helper, select either the Ruby or Elixir implementation (which produce identical results), then enter a series of letters. The tool will check your input against the latest Scrabble dictionary to produce a list of possible words.
For example, an input of band will produce AB, AD, AN, AND, BA, BAD, BAND, DAB, DAN, NA, NAB. Note that each letter in the input can only be used once, just like in Scrabble.
Just delete the repository from your local machine, and you're done! Simple and clean (like the way that you're making me feel tonight~🎵)
- Full credit to Verbus Counts for setting me down this precarious path of functional programming.
- The incredibly well-maintained Elixir Docs
- You, for hanging out