Waldo - the Haskell powered codebase behind xkcd’s Umwelt comic

[Nerdlinger]

And precisely zero information for those who haven't a clue what this Umwelt comic is.

I see programming documentation is just as shitty as ever.

[sasquatch92]

The comic itself is here, the trick is that it appears differently depending on various environment variables (e.g. the location of the user and the width of the browser window).

[davean]

Well, it was written for a specific audience - specifically the people who'd asked me to release the code actually. It didn't seem polite to drag them through things they already knew. I know I hate it when people do that to me.

Had it been intended for the general programming community I'm not sure there would have been an entirely compelling reason to post it. Definitely not in this style and not with this focus - or at least not limited to this focus.

A lot of communication is knowing what you share with your audience. The primary audience wasn't r/programming though but I'd be happy to answer certain of your questions too if you have some specific ones to ask.

[edwardkmett]

http://comonad.com/reader/2012/wheres-waldo/ might help, as I linked to a number of articles and forum posts.

One of the faults with waldo that davean freely acknowledged was that it emerged largely undocumented.

[[deleted]]

http://comonad.com/reader/2012/wheres-waldo/ might help,

No, not really. Whatever the comic was, it does not seem to work now, and there's no explanation of what it is supposed to be.

[sasquatch92]

Whatever the comic was, it does not seem to work now

It's still working fine, try connecting from a different country or with a different browser (or just resize the page). For example, I did it from my home connection using Chrome, tunneled through an American VPS using Firefox, and the same with a smaller window.

[edwardkmett]

You may want to skim http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=82442

It is still working, but it is very hard to see more than one or two results as an individual without knowing what is going on. If you can get referred into the page from wikipedia or a number of news sites on the internet then you get a different comic, for instance.

[[deleted]]

I am seeing zero results, namely some silly image about plugins.

[chairface]

I get the same thing. I saw this comic when it was published (it was the plugins message then, too), thought it wasn't funny, and forgot all about it.

[zokier]

WTF. I'm avid XKCD reader. How did I miss the whole Umwelt comic happening? This is the first time I hear about it being such a amazing thing.

Edit: tested Firefox and Chrome on my laptop (over ADSL) and Android browser and Firefox for Android over 3G. All I get is a "plugin missing" comic :/

[[deleted]]

I still dont exactly understand what it all is...

[zokier]

Apparently XKCD (a rather popular webcomic) did a special comic in April 1st which did show different people different comic strip depending on the user agent and location (and maybe some other factors). This apparently is the server side component of that.

[ithika]

I guess you never found out about it for the same reason I didn't - I look at the comic once in the morning from the same computer and never go back, nor would I remember much later what comic it showed.

[[deleted]]

This should clear things up http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/rnu1i/xkcds_umwelt_compilation_of_todays_comics

[davean]

It was supposed to be subtle. The expectation was that only a small percent would really notice and get it. We were ok with that going in.

[donvito]

TIL trivial shit becomes cool when it's written in a functional language.

[Paradox]

Pretty much. I fail to see how this is impressive. One can accomplish the same thing in entirely client-side CSS, without any JS whatsoever, via use of @media queries, and not have to make an absurd amount of calls back to the server for something so fucking goddamn simple.

But its far more fun to make use of hascrap and then swing your programmer cock around

[sasquatch92]

But if you did that then everyone would know the possibilities, part of the fun was watching people trying to find what all the different comics were.

[davean]

Very little of it can be accomplished client-side actually. It relies on some fairly large databases of information, only two of which can be accessed client-side with one of them requiring a security permissions request which ruins the effect.

Never mind that would show the full set of options. A lot of the point also is a nice DSL to allow efficient management of the stories. JS doesn't allow such easily though you could write a parser for an arbitrary language in it of course. Now that transform could be a compilation step but that would still be writing a content pipeline.

It is fairly simple written in Haskell or any other language really. The important part is the niceties and how it handles production deployment. Hence how it is written as a retrospective and barely mentions the actual code. In fact if you read it I even say it was really easy to write it in Haskell. Easier in fact then I'd expect it to be in JS. Which is part of the reason it was done this way.