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

Conal Elliott conal at conal.net
Fri Jan 30 02:15:15 EST 2009


2009/1/29 Gour <gour at mail.inet.hr>

> >>>>> "Conal" == Conal Elliott <conal at conal.net> writes:
> Hi Conal,
>
> Conal> Hi Achim, I came to the same conclusion: I want to sweep aside
> Conal> these OO, imperative toolkits, and replace them with something
> Conal> "genuinely functional", which for me means having a precise &
> Conal> simple compositional (denotational) semantics.  Something
> Conal> meaningful, formally tractable, and powefully compositional from
> Conal> the ground up.  As long as we build on complex legacy libraries
> Conal> (Gtk, wxWidgets, Qt, OpenGL/GLUT, ...), we'll be struggling
> Conal> against (or worse yet, drawn into) their ad hoc mental models and
> Conal> system designs.
>
> Conal> As Meister Eckhart said, "Only the hand that erases can write the
> Conal> true thing."
>
> Nicely said...
>
> I'm sure you're not the only one desiring to write GUI in "genuinely
> functional" toolkit, but, being realistic and considering how many people
> are working on bindings for those "legacy libraries", I doubt we'll see
> something written from the scratch and usable for "Real World Haskell"
> soon ;)
>
>
> Sincerely,
> Gour


Hi Gour,

I don't mind if it takes a while, since I'm confident it'll be worth the
wait.  Besides, compositionality yields exponential rewards.

Some more encouragement from my friends:

"No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come." -
Victor Hugo

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

Regards,  - Conal
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20090129/1ad26471/attachment.htm


More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list