A GUI toolkit looking for a friend

Simon Peyton-Jones simonpj@microsoft.com
Thu, 22 Feb 2001 04:26:41 -0800


| What's wrong with "ambitious" high-level systems.  Is something amiss
| with their basic ideas or is it the nuts and bolts?  Are they 
| too slow? 
| Too big?  Too abstract?  In short, why is there a need to 
| avoid the high
| level and go for "in-the-middle" systems?  I am still so new 
| to Haskell
| that I have no opinion in the matter, and if Simon's comments reflect
| some hard learned lessons about GUIs, I am curious to know what they
| are.

Nothing's wrong with ambitious systems!  But there's an ambition/pragmatism
tradeoff.  If there was a consensus about the Right Way to build an
ambitious
(more declarative) system then we could all go for it.  But there isn't.  So
let
the experiments flourish, but meanwhile it would be of practical use to many
people
to have a stable, portable (if less sexy) platform on which to build
applications.

Simon