For interactive full-screen terminal applications, the usual go-to ecosystem is
plain C with the ncurses library. However, also the Haskell ecosystem has a
lot to offer: vty, a high-level combinator library for formatting and
arranging text elements on a terminal screen. And building on top of vty we
have brick, a library for layouting terminal applications from widgets.
Where you need to tell ncurses exactly to »put the cursor there and print a
char«, the declarative approach of these libraries is much safer and easier to
manage.
After a short introduction to the basics of event handling and terminal rendering in Haskell, we’re going to play »Pong« on the terminal!
Franz Thoma is originally a physicist and works as a consultant and software engineer at TNG Technology Consulting in Munich. While spending time there on domain specific languages and building compilers, he discovered his love for functional languages and expressive type systems. With Haskell, Franz found a robust and elegant language to express himself, which he uses for his own personal tooling as well as a thinking tool. At TNG, he currently works on high-throughput ingestion of real-time data for a client’s Big Data platform.
