Nethack (again)!: AdaGames

["Kent Paul Dolan" <xanthian@well.com>]

"Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbryant@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:

> and games are probably the
> best domain for "advocacy" projects if you are trying to get people
> interested in Ada, OSS, or whatever.

Agreed, emphatically.

> Think of a game
> you've played and liked but always found yourself saying "this would be
> lots better if you could do XYZ", and implement a version with XYZ.

Beware of getting sucked into this like a sailor into the Maelstrom,
though.

My little attempt to "put 'xyz'" into Scott Robert Ladd's Traveller
applet (somewhere under http://www.coyotegulch.com), passed 800,000
bytes of (Java) source code recently, with no obvious stopping point in
sight.

[I'm trying to force myself to stop adding source momentarily and clean
up the docs again so I can post release epsilon to
http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/java/TravellerDoc.html where the prior
version is sitting now; so far I have added the needed text for all the
interface and code changes, and rearranged text to match interface
rearrangements, but not yet proofread it or checked it for
completeness. Even the docs page is a substantial fraction of a MibiByte
these days.]

His single window applet has become one with 5 main windows and dozens
of pop up ones, his five (later six) possible checkbox choices are my
50, et cetera ad obsessivium.  (I made that word up, trust me.)

As the thread followup to my Nethack! mod of this thread shows, there is
interest, there are bodies interested who have begun such a project in
the past, there is a _huge_ underestimate of how hard such a project
would be (Nethack, long, long ago, had over 100 contributors of code,
all of whose styles one would have to learn to read and understand,
I'm sure it is much worse now, and one is, after all, porting C, a
write-only programming language),  there is an agreement that it would
make a good "advocacy" project for sucking students into the Ada orbit,
and there is a mention of the obvious, that without example code,
programmers given a choice of languages turn to one where example code
exists (much as for my Traveller rewrite, which I began with a total
prior Java experience of one _line_ of Java code written).

Now, can we get a few Teachers Of Ada to commit to forming a
multi-university "distributed programming in the large" project to
reimplement NetHack in Ada?  A useful target enhancement would be to
make it a multi-player game across network servers (at which point
higher education planet-wide would probably come to a grinding halt, but
that's why usage metering for students exists).

After a semester or two, the project would probably maintain itself.
After a substantial body of Nethack-in-Ada source code is created,
subsequent co-authors can program by example.  That makes this a
wonderful place to teach the art of writing maintainable code.

Putting some fun into coursework would be a fine way to get students
really obsessed with Ada.

xanthian.




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