wordle

It's Wordle! You know the one.

This example doesn't really focus on any particular one feature of Kotter to demonstrate it, but rather, it serves as a fairly realistic example of a whole program. Among other things, it uses...

• liveVar for state management
• textAnimOf for drawing an animated ellipsis while waiting for dictionaries to download
• input for requesting input from the user
• onInputChanged and onInputEntered to handle input in the run block.
• addTimer for revealing the tile colors slowly instead of all at once
• Setting section data for high contrast mode, which can then act as a sort of scoped global data accessible across the whole section.
• Kotter-scope extension methods (e.g. RenderScope.setColorFor(tile))
  • Also used to separate models (e.g. Board, Row) and their rendering (e.g. RenderScope.renderBoard, RenderScope.renderRow)

Overall, you get a flow that ping pongs between rendering the game state and code for handling the user's input.

Wordle's success is a testament to its execution, because as you can see here, the idea, stripped down to its core essence, is very simple! You can find the main logic for testing a Wordle row in the Row.from function, just 30 lines of code that took less than 30 minutes to figure out. If you squint at it right, that algorithm is worth 7 figures according to the NYTimes! (Of course, there are additional factors, especially the social network effect and easy access to the game through web browsers with mobile support, but c'mon, it's fun to oversimplify).