DOWN THE OREGON TRAIL WITH FUNCTIONAL C#
In 1971, three students from Minnesota thought they could liven up a history lecture by creating a computer game for the students to play, and after several days of work in HP Time Share BASIC, they came up with what turned out to be a significant milestone in the history of computer games - Oregon Trail.
Oregon Trail is often regarded as one of the first great computer games, as well as being the originator of a franchise that is still running to this day. It was effectively also one of the first instances of both Shareware and a Commercial home release of(depending on the version).
My interest though, isn't just in historical computer games, it's also .NET and Functional Programming. I want to use this as a worked example of one of my passions - Functional Programming in C#! The challenge I've set myself is to redevelop Oregon Trail into C# using the following restrictions:
- Near 100% unit test coverage
- No variables can change state once set
- No statements (for, foreach, if, where, etc.) unless there literally is no way of avoiding them
I'll also be demonstrating a few of the tricks Functional Programming can offer, like Higher-order functions, functional flows with simple Monads and Tail Recursion. There should also be a bit of retro computing fun, while we're at it.
Presented at:
DotNet Oxford - Virtual - 14th June 2022
NDC Melbourne - Melbourne, Australia - 22nd June 2022
Func Prog Sweden - Virtual - 9th August 2022
DotNet Sheffield - Sheffield, UK - 14th September 2022
NDC Oslo - Oslo, Norway - 30th September, 2022
DotNet Conf - Virtual - 8th November, 2022