[Haskell-cafe] The Good, the Bad and the GUI

[Brandon Allbery]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 6:16 PM, Wojtek Narczyński <wojtek at power.com.pl>
wrote:

> Let me write the same thing in other words. It is not controversial to say
> on this list that specifying what is correct means, is a good idea. But for
> GUIs, in addition to the strong type, you need another relaxed type to hold
> the values temporarily, until the human manages to deliver correct data,
> often by trial and error.


I think there are far larger issues to deal with first: you need to have a
sensible connection from Haskell to a GUI before you can worry about
getting data across it. At the moment, we have either mostly procedural
interfaces to common procedural toolkits (WxHaskell, gtk2hs) or a number of
still largely experimental FRP interfaces.

It is not particularly difficult to deal with the step that you highlight
once we have solved the basic interface to the GUI; you can do it with
Template Haskell, or generics, or lens, or with semi-typed interfaces
between Haskell and the GUI (for example, I can see Aeson sitting in this
layer). But figuring out how to work it in depends on knowing what we're
working it into.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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