[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskellers hate GUIs!!

[Dominic Espinosa]

On Fri, Apr 02, 2010 at 06:11:52PM +0100, Stephen Tetley wrote:
> On 2 April 2010 17:53, Dominic Espinosa <dcespin at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 
> [SNIP]
> 
> > I ended up rewriting it in another language (due to time
> > pressure) and I'm a little wary of attempting to use Haskell again for
> > developing such an application.
> 
> Out of curiosity what language did you choose instead?

Some algol-like language purporting to have cross-platform GUI support,
widely used by others in our department.  I think the name started with
"J". I did not enjoy the rewrite. The Haskell code was a lot nicer (and
shorter). However, the application had to be deployed to arbitrary
MacBook users, and the process of installing the Haskell infrastructure
plus MacPorts plus the MacPort of gtk2hs (which had a lot of
dependencies, if I remember correctly) seemed too arduous to expect all
Mac-based users of my application to go through, especially when
battling the "what is this 'Haskell' business? why didn't you use
blub, like a normal person?" sentiment. Is there an easier way?

The process of using cabal-install on Linux is similar, but the
'distribution culture' there is a lot different. I fully expect to
install packages and their dependencies with a package manager, or at
least download and compile a tarball, and tend to be suspicious of
binary-only releases.  But they are the norm on those two other
platforms. It would be nice if there were a quick way of generating such
packages.