[Haskell-cafe] Pure functional GUI (was "a regressive view of support for imperativeprogramming in Haskell")

[David F. Place]

On Aug 8, 2007, at 3:14 PM, Peter Verswyvelen wrote:

> So could you please tell me more about the problem with pure  
> functional GUIs and why this is not part of the Haskell library? I  
> mean a GUI library completely written in Haskell, not wrapping a  
> popular library.

I had quite a lot of experience in pure functional GUI technology in  
developing the user-interface for the ICAD system -- a domain  
specific language for mechanical engineering.  We developed another  
domain specific language for describing user-interface objects as a  
tree structure and implemented commands as applicative transactions  
using Zippers, though we called them path transactions.  (Oh, did I  
mention this was in 1987?)  Redisplay and undo of course were handled  
automatically.  It was developed on Lisp Machines and then ported to  
X-Windows.   I believe there are some nooks and crannies in the  
aircraft industry were it is still being used.

There were some issues which time may have solved.

1.)  Redisplay could be a little tedious due to slow video hardware.
2.)  Locality became a problem with the shared data-structures being  
spread throughout
memory.  Thus performance could be adversely affected by paging.  (In  
1987, 8MBytes of Lisp Machine memory cost $10,000.)

Issues that time won't solve.

1.) It was non-standard -- at the time that meant "not Motif."  Does  
anybody remember Motif?
2.) It is a thankless task.  Innovation is not welcomed.   It's  
better left up to committees.

I don't believe that there is any technical reason why something  
interesting couldn't be done.  But if you actually want people to use  
your GUI tools, that is several orders of magnitude more work -- and  
not the most interesting kind.

An interesting possibility that arises when coding has become so  
effortless as it now has in Haskell, is to create GUI technologies  
just for a single project.  Encourage innovation and experimentation  
in usability with a captive audience.   An example of this is the  
PureData computer music system.  The user-interface is quite  
innovative and non-standard, but the users of the application have  
taken it to a cult status even though it's purposefully kind of ugly.

http://puredata.info/

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David F. Place
mailto:d at vidplace.com