rsuniev / funky-java-tic-tac-toe

A text-based tic-tac-toe game written as a way to experiment with functional programming and persistent data structures in Java 8

Funky Java Tic Tac Toe

This repository contains a text-based tic-tac-toe game written as a way to experiment with functional programming and persistent data structures in Java 8.

0 1 2
3 4 5
6 7 8

Player X, it's your turn, enter a number: 4

0 1 2
3 X 5
6 7 8

Player O, it's your turn, enter a number: 

Quick start

Make sure you have sbt and Java 8 installed on your system.

• To run the tic-tac-toe game: sbt run
• To run the tests: sbt test

See the [http://www.scala-sbt.org/0.13/tutorial/Running.html](SBT documentation) for other commands.

Functional programming

Java 8 introduced a number of new features to Java, including lambda expressions and streams that open the door to a more functional style of programming. I wrote this app to see what it was like to write a nearly pure functional app, subject to the following constraints:

• Immutable data: just about every variable and field is marked as final. All data structures are immutable.
• Persistent data structures: there is no need to worry about performance with a tic-tac-toe game, but for fun, I experimented with the persistent data structures from the pcollections library.
• Pure functions: the functions in the TicTacToe class are the only ones that performs I/O. All other functions are pure.

Navigating the code

Here are the main highlights of the code:

• Board.java: an immutable representation of an n x n tic-tac-toe board that can be filled with X's and O's.
• GameState.java: an immutable representation of a game, including the Board and the current player's turn. The makeMove method places a new X or O on the board and returns a new GameState. The isGameOver returns true if there is a winner or a tie. The findWinner method returns the winner of the game or Optional.empty if there is no winner.
• TicTacToe.java: this class contains the main method and is the only one that performs I/O. It starts with an empty GameState and uses Stream.iterate and GameState.makeMove to generate new GameStates based on user input until Gametate.isGameOver is true.

Thoughts

Overall, Java 8 is a massive step forward for the language, but I'm not sure it's enough. It took much longer to write this app in a functional style than I expected due to lots of annoyances:

• The higher order functions in the Stream API, such as map, reduce, and filter, are all designed to work in parallel. This may be useful for performance reasons, but to support parallel operation, the signatures of some of these methods are sometimes a little different than the equivalent methods in all other programming languages (e.g. there is no foldLeft or foldRight because a parallel operation doesn't go linearly from one side to the other).
• The need to convert Java collections to a Stream (e.g. by calling .stream()) and back (e.g. by calling .collect(Collectors.toList())) in order to use higher order functions is verbose. I wish I could just call map directly on a List or Set.
• Some code, such as determining if a Board had a winner, was much harder to do in an immutable fashion using the Stream API than with good old fashioned for, break, and return. If anyone knows a cleaner pattern for implementing Board.findWinner(), let me know.
• It is tedious and verbose to mark every variable as final. I wish immutable was the default or there was a more concise construct, such as using val vs var in Scala.
• It's not clear why numeric streams need special treatment, such as the IntStream and DoubleStream classes and the mapToInt and mapToDouble higher order functions.
• I sorely missed Scala's sequence comprehensions when I had to chain many map and flatMap calls together.
• Most collection APIs in Java do not provide immutability guarantees, not even the Java 8 Stream APIs, so you have to be extra careful to use persistent collections or Guava's immutable collections.
• While some Java code uses Optional, most still uses null. And, of course, you could even set an Optional variable to null, so it's still very easy to hit a NullPointerException.
• The compile errors, at least in IntelliJ, were less helpful than usual. Many of them seemed to be caused by a minor error in a type signature causing type inference to fail and return a less-than-helpful "cyclic reference" error.

License

This code is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.