Debugging & Refactoring, a mid-mortum

So I haven't touched my Bluetooth bindings in the past week, having been a bit intimidated by the prospect of sitting down and making the necessary network interfaces to actually handle doing real communication & not just simple queries. I can tell it's not going to be too hard once I get started, but it doesn't look like the most exciting thing in the world.

To get my motivation up, I worked instead on some of the small physics games into which I wanted to eventually integrate wiimote controls. Making a small game engine in Haskell hasn't been entirely easy, but that's more a function of my inexperience & that I don't think I've been using language features to their best advantage.

I lost a bit of my time wrestling with trying to make the engine interface feel "object oriented", which is where my mini-rant about type class abuse last week came from.

At this point, though, I have a good percentage of the code I need to make a few of my game ideas; however, the percentage of code that's working in all the cases it needs to is much smaller, particularly the generic collision detection & handling for polygons. There's a number of cases in my testing that keep coming up with unexpected results.

I've spent some time in the GHCi debugger, which is actually a lot more easy to use than I expected. If you haven't used the debugger yet I recommend that you read issue 10 of The Monad Reader and the rather nice tutorial provided therein. One minor thing I want to emphasize about using the debugger is that if you force a value that's returned by a function before you start stepping through the function, you won't actually step through the function by doing :step. GHCi will just continue with whatever compuation is done with the value you forced. Again, it's a minor thing but it took me a few seconds to realize why I skipped over the step-thru of one of the functions I was trying to diagnose.

Even though the debugger is actually fairly nice, my real problem is that I've made a number of small logical mistakes & built upon those mistakes without realizing I had made them in the first place. I think a good next step for this project would be to start pulling in the old QuickCheck machinery, trying to define the algebraic properties the functions in the physics engine should obey, refactoring the whole mess, and making sure it passes all of my tests from the get-go. This should prevent the "Oh, I think everything is fixed now so let's just start bouncing some squares around the screen...looks good...great...@#%*!" loop.