[Haskell-cafe] Getting frantic with FranTk

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2008-01-13 at 14:54 +0100, Torsten Otto wrote:
> Howdy,
> 
> with a just-in-time-learning approach I managed to teach my class of  
> advanced high schoolers the basics of functional programming using  
> Haskell (I had only used Scheme before). Now to show them that Haskell  
> is not a weirdo esoteric command line only language, I thought I'd end  
> the class with spoken output (easy enough with the System module and  
> "say" in Mac OS) and a GUI for input using FranTk.

Honestly, if you could get FranTk to work I'd be very impressed. My
impression is that it is extremely bitrotted. I would suggest trying one
of the other GUI libs that has seen some maintenance this century. (I'm
not joking - http://haskell.org/FranTk/ says it works with ghc-4.04
which was released in 1999)

That also probably means using ghc rather than hugs since most of the
modern GUI libs only work with ghc. The only exception is HGL, which is
rumoured to still work wit hugs (though again it has seen little to no
maintenance in recent years).

So I'd recommend the new SOE, OpenGL, Gtk2Hs or wxHaskell. All of those
come with some demos you can show off. SOE and OpenGL are purely for
doing drawings and animation (OpenGL is 3D of course). The other two are
full blown GUI toolkits.

http://haskell.org/soe
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Opengl
http://haskell.org/gtk2hs
http://wxhaskell.sourceforge.net/

Duncan