[GUI] Re: Gtk and Object I/O

[Adrian Hey]

On Friday 24 January 2003 10:06, Axel Simon wrote:
> This "let's do it all ourself" sounds very much like the
> "not-invented-here" syndrome. Please realize that there are libraries out
> there which are free, portable, well maintained and accomplish all that
> what you would like to do from scratch. Gtk is one such example.

Sorry Axel, I didn't mean to deprecate your efforts regarding binding
to Gtk (or Manuels or Krasimir's ObjectIO binding). I recognise that
from a pragmatic viewpoint these are fine libraries which meet the
immediate needs of most programmers.

But I don't think it's true that they accomplish all that what *I* would
like to do, in an ideal world. I'm still of the opinion that whilst
expedient, writing a Haskell binding to any complex C (or C++ or Java..)
library will prove inconvenient for FP'ers in the end. Of course there's
no avoiding this problem entirely, the library has to bind to something
at the end of the day unless it's going to talk directly to hardware.

I think the more primitive and fewer our primitives are the better,
because doing this invloves fewer implicit assumptions about how gui's
should work, and IMHO makes porting simpler too. Of course this
flexibility comes at the price having to write a useable library on
top of these primitives ourselves in Haskell. Something I'm happy
to try. But I'm the only one it seems :-)

Regards
--
Adrian Hey