// the find
sharkdp/cube-composer
A puzzle game inspired by functional programming
A browser puzzle game where you arrange functional combinators to transform colored cube walls into a target pattern. It's a teaching tool disguised as a game — the mechanics are literally function composition, map, and filter applied to lists. Written in PureScript, which makes it a double curiosity: interesting subject matter in an interesting language.
The core mechanic is genuinely clever — dragging combinators into a pipeline and watching cubes transform is a better explanation of map/filter/compose than most tutorials. PureScript is an appropriate choice here; the game logic maps cleanly onto the type system, and Wall as List (List Cube) is self-documenting. The solver CLI is a nice touch: it can verify that a level has exactly one shortest solution, which matters for puzzle design. Level authoring is straightforward enough that contributing new puzzles is realistic.
Bower and Gulp in 2026 is a real problem — the build toolchain is dead and getting a local environment running is going to be an afternoon of archaeology. Last push was late 2022 and it shows; no indication the maintainer is active. Travis CI badge links to a service that's effectively gone for open-source projects. Content-wise, six chapters is thin — someone who picks this up will run out of puzzles before they've fully internalized the concepts.