[Haskell-cafe] How difficult would creating a collaborative multi-user online virtual world application be in Haskell?

[Benjamin L.Russell]

One question that has been coming up at the back of my mind for the
past several weeks has been how difficult would it be to create a
collaborative multi-user online virtual world application in Haskell.

More specifically, last August, I came across a very interesting
application called Croquet (see
http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page), which happens to be
based on Squeak (see http://www.squeak.org/), a dialect of Smalltalk.
Croquet, in turn, provides the basis for Cobalt (see
http://www.duke.edu/~julian/Cobalt/Home.html), a "virtual workspace
browser and construction toolkit for accessing, creating, and
publishing hyperlinked multi-user virtual environments" (according to
the home page for that project).

What struck me as especially interesting was how Croquet allows
multiple users to collaborate together in a multi-user online virtual
world in software development and other collaborative projects.  As
one application, the video clip on the upper-right-hand corner of the
above-mentioned Croquet home page illustrates how a user can, by
writing code from inside the application, create on-the-fly additional
virtual environments, which can then be entered by either the
programmer or other programmers.  Other applications (shown in other
video clips on the "Screenshots/Videos" page (see
http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Screenshots/Videos) show
alternative applications that include text-based annotations, a 3D
spreadsheet, and writing a conventional blog from within a virtual
world.

Unfortunately, Smalltalk is an object-oriented language.  If possible,
I would like to see something similar in a functional programming
language such as Haskell.

Does anybody know whether duplicating this project in Haskell would be
feasible?

-- Benjamin L. Russell
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Benjamin L. Russell  /   DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com
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