Haskell For Kids: A Web-Based Environment

In a comment on my last post here, Matthias Felleisen made the comment that it might be possible to make the first week or two of the Haskell for Kids effort go better if there were a web-based environment available.  After some thought, I’ve set out to create such a thing, and I’ve got an afternoon’s worth of proof of concept put together now.  Here, I’ll explain what it is, what the status of it is, and how it works.

WARNING!

Before I say any more, let me point out that you need to be very careful about running the code I’m talking about.  It’s in its very early stages, and the project involves running arbitrary other people’s code on your computers.  Obviously, that’s just a bit dangerous.  In particular,

• Do not run this code on any system containing sensitive information, like SSL private keys, personal information, etc.
• Do not run this code on a public network where untrusted people might be connecting.
• Do not run this code if you have enemies who know you’re doing it, or friends with a malfunctioning sense of humor…

The medium-term plan is to use GHC 7.2’s SafeHaskell extension, along with a reasonable set of resource limits, to run code safely and prevent access to unsafePerformIO and friends.  This is not part of the code yet, so for now it’s very, very unsafe.

Introducing the gloss-web package…

If you look at https://github.com/cdsmith/gloss-web, you’ll find a small amount of initial code toward a web-based environment for Haskell programming in Gloss.  It includes:

• A web-based editor with syntax highlighting for Haskell, based on Cloud9’s ACE editor.
• A compilation server that compiles, builds, and runs programs.
• A JavaScript and JSON-based rendering system for viewing the resulting images.

In short, it’s everything you need to build pictures using Gloss without a local installation of Haskell.

Don’t take this as saying that you can completely skip installing Haskell for the class that’s starting in a few days.  In the end, that’s probably a bad idea.  But in a few situations (particularly in my in-person class, where getting GHC installed on everyone’s computers is likely to take some time), it may help rather a lot to have the ability for students to run their first programs in a web-based system.

Keep in mind that if you’re helping just one kid, as many blog readers are planning on doing, then this is probably a waste of your time.  Just install Haskell on the computer your kid is using instead!

What does it look like?

Good question!

How to Install

I have not released this on Hackage yet, because it’s in very, very early stages.  But you can download it from the github URL above and install it as follows.

• Download the current code from github
• Change into the directory and type ‘cabal install’.
• Type ‘gloss-web’ to run.

You’ll need some relatively recent version of the Haskell Platform to get it working.  If you’re having problems, feel free to ask for help.

Want to Help?

For any experienced Haskell programmers out there who are interested in helping out, patches would be great!  I’ve got plans, and do intend to do them on an as-needed basis as the year-long class proceeds (three cheers for “lazy” evaluation!), but I’m also happy to accept patches from anyone else.

Some of the outstanding challenges include:

• Test and get it working in more web browsers.  Currently it runs fine in Chrome, and I hope to have no major issues in Firefox or Safari, but I imagine IE will be a whole new ball game.
• Add a better way to load images, since you can’t use the IO monad.  One thought I have is to let you upload images, and then throw in a built-in module called Images that can be imported that (via unsafePerformIO) defines symbols for each uploaded image.
• Use SafeHaskell in GHC 7.2, or some other mechanism, to enforce safe execution and prevent use of Template Haskell, unsafePerformIO, the FFI, or any other tricks to get around the type system and run arbitrary code.
• Implement resource limits and timeouts in case of badly behaved programs.
• Add support for the animation, simulation, and game interfaces of gloss.  This will involve some kind of streaming from the server via XMLHTTPRequest or some such thing.
• Better organization of the code.  This will probably use Snap 0.6 extensions, so I’m just keeping it working until that’s released.

I’m particularly interested in getting some of the safety issues handled, as that’s a prerequisite to running this publicly (currently I will be running it locally only for my local class).  The rest of it would be awesome too, though!

Enjoy!