[Haskell-cafe] To yi or not to yi, is this really the question? A plea for a cooperative, ubiquitous, distributed integrated development system.

[Pasqualino 'Titto' Assini]

Hi Claus,

On Monday 18 June 2007 18:14:58 Claus Reinke wrote:
> >Having just presented a case for the possible rationality of the
> >irrational decision of creating an Emacs-like IDE in Haskell, I
> >wonder if we should not be even more irrational and contemplate the
> >possibility of using Haskell to create a radically different kind of
> >IDE..  New technologies are often used to imitate and reimplement the
> >artefacts of previous technologies.
>
> don't underestimate those "previous" technologies, though. given your
>  you're almost certain to find this interesting:
>  Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment

Thanks for the reference.

I actually knew about Croquet but I thought of it mostly as an "open-source 
second life" because of its emphasys on shared 3D worlds but you are quite 
right, it might also be useful for cooperative software development.

I must admit that my dream doesn't go so far, I was more thinking about 
Web/Web services kind of technology to integrate distributed traditional 
development text-based tools (editors, compilers, etc.) plus a configurable 
Web based UI. 

> if you look closely, you'll see that croquet is implemented in squeak,
> which in turn is a re-implementation of one of the ancient smalltalks.
>
> squeak is by no means the ideal implementation language for this
> kind of project, nor am i completely convinced by the synchronous
> approach used for croquet. but while implementation of croquet
> in squeak is obviously doable, i see various difficulties for doing
> the same in haskell.
>
> where squeak is too dynamic/imperative/flexible, haskell is too
> static/unreflective/limited (ever tried to pass functions through
> haskell's i/o interface?

Is this really a limitation of the language proper or just of its 
implementations?

Is there any fundamental reasons why Haskell functions/closures cannot be 
serialised?

I believe that this is precisely what the distributed version of GHC used to 
do.

Most languages, even Java, have a reflection capability to dynamically inspect 
an object. It is surprising that Haskell doesn't offer it.

...
> persistence [many starts, no finish

Have you checked the prevayler-inspired approach implemented in HAppS ? 


> , but see Clean's first  
> class i/o]

What advantages does it provide?


> reflection/meta-programming [Data/Typeable, template 
> haskell..; meta ml?]). 
> one dream would be successors to haskell and 
> croquet so that croquet' could be implemented in haskell''.

Is just the lack of reflection in Haskell that you miss? 

Or there are other things as well?

best,

        titto