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

[Jonathan Cast]

On Mon, 2009-02-02 at 13:28 -0800, Conal Elliott wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Creighton Hogg <wchogg at gmail.com>
> 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?
> 
> Again, my goal would not be a "purely functional" library, because
> even IO is "purely functional".  My goal is a "denotational" library,
> i.e., one that has an elegant (denotational) semantics, and hence is
> powerfully compositional and good for reasoning.

+1

jcc