I began this several months after a class I took on functional programming in Haskell. Learning Haskell was a huge eye opener in terms of thinking about programming and seeing what is out there.

I’ve been working on it off (mostly off) and on since then, and finished a playable implementation this week. Especially after having dropped it and started it back up so many times in that period, I’ve realized this implementation is very poor. Not only is it non-idiomatic, but I have not taken full advantage of the type system and functional aspects of the language to help complete it.

Although the game is fairly trivial, there were areas of implementaiton that took me longer than expected, just trying to work out the logic. I think that is the hallmark of bad or poorly organized code.

It would be nice at some point to get this code reviewed by some more practiced Haskell programmers, and then attempt a rewrite. I have ideas about how to utilize the type system to make the code more simple. Some of the areas of logic might also be a good area to use GADTs, which I recall are useful for (here my terminology may be lacking) type-check on constructors.

I hope to continue working on it to add some form of AI, and possibly a GUI using gtk2hs or wxhaskell, although this might be a good opportunity to try one of the popular Haskell web frameworks.

The source code is available at: https://github.com/jamiely/haskell-draughts.