[Haskell-cafe] Why binding to existing widget toolkits doesn't make any sense

[Conal Elliott]

Could CSS give us semantic clarity?  - Conal

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:58 AM, John A. De Goes <john at n-brain.net> wrote:

>
> The actual presentation and layout of widgets would be better handled by a
> DSL such as CSS (which is, in fact, declarative in nature), while event
> logic would be best handled purely in Haskell.
>
> Regards,
>
> John A. De Goes
> N-BRAIN, Inc.
> The Evolution of Collaboration
>
> http://www.n-brain.net    |    877-376-2724 x 101
>
>
> On Feb 2, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Creighton Hogg wrote:
>
>  2009/1/29 Conal Elliott <conal at conal.net>:
>>
>>> Hi Achim,
>>>
>>> I came to the same conclusion: I want to sweep aside these OO, imperative
>>> toolkits, and replace them with something "genuinely functional", which
>>> for
>>> me means having a precise & simple compositional (denotational)
>>> semantics.
>>> Something meaningful, formally tractable, and powefully compositional
>>> from
>>> the ground up.  As long as we build on complex legacy libraries (Gtk,
>>> wxWidgets, Qt, OpenGL/GLUT, ...), we'll be struggling against (or worse
>>> yet,
>>> drawn into) their ad hoc mental models and system designs.
>>>
>>> As Meister Eckhart said, "Only the hand that erases can write the true
>>> thing."
>>>
>>
>> I think working on a purely functional widget toolkit would actually
>> be a really cool project.  Do you have any ideas, though, on what
>> should be the underlying primitives?
>>
>> The initial gut feeling I have is that one should just ignore any
>> notion of actually displaying widgets & instead focus on a clean
>> algebra of how to 'add'  widgets that relates the concepts of
>> inheritance & relative position.  What I mean by inheritance, here, is
>> how to direct a flow of 'events'.  I don't necessarily mean events in
>> the Reactive sense, because I think it'd be important to make the
>> model completely independent of how time & actual UI actions are
>> handled.
>>
>> Any thoughts to throw in, here?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> C
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