[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell-beginners] appropriateness of haskell for GUIs

[Adrian Neumann]

Am 21.03.2009 um 13:30 schrieb Michael Mossey:

>
>
> Thomas Davie wrote:
>> On 21 Mar 2009, at 00:16, Michael P Mossey wrote:
>>> Hello, I'm totally new to Haskell. I'm thinking of using it for a  
>>> personal project, which is a gui-based musical score editor.
>> The rough situation of GUI programming on Haskell is that it works  
>> just as well as in any imperative programming language.  This is  
>> rather disappointing, simply because so many other things are  
>> massively easier in Haskell, and this isn't true of GUI  
>> programming (yet).
>
> Hi Bob,
>
> I can imagine that GUI programming is no easier (yet). It is  
> inherently very "stateful." GUI's have modes, such as which screens  
> are displayed, which dialogs are displayed, which options within  
> those dialogs are valid given the other state of the program, etc.  
> When I write GUIs, I often diagram them as state machines to get a  
> handle on what's going on.
>
> So, I'm not familiar with GUI programming on Haskell, but would you  
> say the statefulness of GUIs (in their typical implementations) is  
> the reason they are no easier on Haskell?
>
> I strongly prefer to use qtHaskell because I'm familiar with Qt,  
> and Qt is extremely capable. For example, it can draw text and  
> shapes with antialiasing, which will be great for a music score  
> editor. Music scores have lots of small shapes to fit on the  
> screen, and antialiasing will provide ease of reading. I don't know  
> how much of Qt is implemented in qtHaskell, or whether the latest  
> version of Qt (4.4) is implemented.
>
> Thanks,
> Mike

The main problem is, as far as I know, the complete lack of any  
usable GUI designer. You have to type everything yourself. That's  
very annoying. It's a lot easier in other languages because your  
tools take away the cumbersome twiddling with widgets.

However, I haven't googled. Maybe the situation has changed since I  
last looked.

Regards,

Adrian
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