Learn functional programming with me - improving my workflow

So I ended up picking this up again towards the end of March (yes I know, it's near the end of May now, I've ended up writing and doing a lot...)

This is where I was up to last time:

• Mission statement
• Drawing a square
• Moving the square
• Attributes and vectors

And the Github repo is here: github.com/robashton/clojure-spaceinvaders

I advise you pop back and read those if you're just tuning in, as I've had to as well in order to start up again!

Improving my workflow

I'm writing this after I've learned a lot about managing my workflow to keep myself interested in tasks, and I'm writing this after writing a silly number of posts about writing an OData parser in OMeta, which reminded me an awful lot of what functional programming was like, so I came back here.

So, what have I done to make my life easier with this Clojure malarkey?

Well, I want faster feedback, I don't want to have to keep spawning up Java and I don't want any manaul build process.

Here is what I came up with (I know there is a repl and stuff, but I honestly just want to get some Clojure written at this stage and this seemed nice)

I'm using cljs-watch, and I've written a Makefile that looks like this:

default: build
all: build

build:
  cljsc game.cljs \
      '{:optimizations :simple :pretty-print true}' \
      > ./game.js

develop:
  cljs-watch game.cljs \
    '{:optimizations :simple :pretty-print true :output-to "./game.js"}'

Hacky, but if I type "make develop", I can get on and write code without having to worry about compilation so I'm happier with life, now I just make changes and hit refresh and they're there.

Reminding myself of where I was

First off, I specify that I'm sticking this all in the namespace 'game'

    (ns game)

I define a method called 'context', which takes no args

    (defn context []

I let 'target' be thbe result of calling .getElementById (interop)

      (let [target (.getElementById js/document "target")]

Return a 'vector' containing the context, the width, and the height

        [
          (.getContext target "2d") 
          (. target -width)
          (. target -height)
        ]
      )
    )

Define a function called clearScreen, taking in a vector of 'ctx, width, height' - see above

    (defn clearScreen [[ctx width height]]

Set a property on the context of fillStyle '#FFF'

      (set! (. ctx -fillStyle) "#FFF")

Call clearRect on the context, with 0,0,width,height

      (.clearRect ctx 0 0 width height) 
    )

Same again, only parameterised so we're drawing a square

    (defn drawSquare [[ctx width height] x y w h]
      (set! (. ctx -fillStyle) "#FF0")
      (.fillRect ctx x y w h) 
    )

Now we have a function called tick which will call clearScreen over and over again, with drawSquare over again

    (defn tick [x]
      (let [ctx (context)] 
        (clearScreen ctx) 
        (drawSquare ctx x 0 100 100)  
        (if (<= x 1000) 
          (js/setTimeout (fn []

And every frame, we call tick with a new version of the state, in this case an increased 'x'

            (tick (inc x)) 

          ) 33  )
        )
      )
    )

We export a function called 'init' so I can call this from JS and make the game happen

    (defn ^:export init []
      (tick 0) 
    )

Wow. There is a lot to (re)-take in here.

First off, some observations

• Dom interop is horrible
• I remember now that I had state issues, I think I had that question answered on Github though, so we'll have a look at that next

ONWARDS WITH THIS PROJECT