Elm

Robot Finds Kitten

Sometime way back in the past, a human who wanted me to feel joy introduced me to Robot Finds Kitten, a Zen simulation which is pretty close to exactly what it says on the tin. There are already quite a lot of ports of the original POSIX implementation, but none of them were written in Elm. Obviously this is a problem that needs fixing.

Before I get into the gory details of learning Elm via robots, I should tell you that my implementation is available for free play (edit: sorry, this has bitrotted too much to be included anymore), and you can also go look at the source code.

I got a really wonderful introduction to Elm when Evan Czaplicki came to Hacker School in our second week. We got a slightly adapted version of this talk from StrangeLoop 2013, which moved me to make a browser game (something I’ve never wanted to do at any previous point in life). The language seemed elegant and expressive, for lack of less cliched words, and I thought it might be relatively simple to make a succinct Robot Finds Kitten clone.