[Haskell-cafe] Status of Haskell + Mac + GUIs & graphics

[Jurriën Stutterheim]

Regarding 3:
I was not implying that Haskell should be used only for replacing JS. Far from it. I was just saying that we need a solid way to generate JS from Haskell so that we can profit even more from Haskell's type safety and not have to suffer from the mess that is JS. My Snap-based application is also perfectly type-safe, on the server. It's fast too. :)

On 18 May, 2011, at 20:25 , Tom Murphy wrote:

> On 5/18/11, Donn Cave <donn at avvanta.com> wrote:
>> Quoth =?iso-8859-1?Q?Jurri=EBn_Stutterheim?= <j.stutterheim at me.com>,
>> ...
>>> So here's my (perhaps slightly provoking) question: do we need to
>>> care at all about good GUI toolkits being available? Web applications,
>>> especially with an HTML 5 front-end, have become increasingly more
>>> powerful. If we can also find a good, standardized way to generate
>>> JS from our Haskell code, we're pretty much all set.
>> 
>> That isn't so controversial - do we need to care about good GUI
>> toolkits being available?  Evidently not, we can say that from the
>> fact that we're still looking for GUI support on the Mac in 2011.
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> I'd give three reasons for disagreeing:
> 1. Developing a complete GUI has been a low priority up until now, but
> now that other, more urgent areas of development are starting to
> thrive, its time has come.
> 2. Yes, having essentially no complete GUI support has suited our
> needs up until now, but these have been the needs of a certain type of
> programmer. IF the community would like to grow, or would like to be
> able to use Haskell at work, I'd say a GUI supporting the above would
> be very valuable.
> 3. Using the web as Haskell's main method of non-command line
> (graphical) deployment seems to lose two of Haskell's most powerful
> features: its type safety, and its speed.
>     If we use Haskell essentially as a JS abstraction layer, we lose
> all type safety (in the event that anyone goes in and tinkers with the
> generated JS).
>     A main reason people are showing interest in FP is because of
> purity, and therefore its potential speed on multicore machines. If we
> just generate to JS, this is also lost. In fact, speed on single-core
> machines is lost also.
> 
> Again, my 2¢,
> Tom
> 
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