A GUI toolkit looking for a friend

[Jerzy Karczmarczuk]

Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:


> 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


As a (sometimes quite nervous...) user of the Clean GUI, I assure
all profans who never touched it that

* It is quite ambitious. Oh yes, ambitious it is.
* It is quite sexy, especially for those for whom everything is
  in a sense sexy. But it is inspiring, and has some metallic
  elegance. (For some people Robocop *IS* sexy).
* It is powerful!

===

I began to scratch my head.
Presumably all this business of local and global states is translatable
to Haskell without much disturbances.
But I am not sure whether I could monadise all unique-access objects
(including Picture etc.) without serious troubles. Even in my short
private essays, where I tried to "Haskellize" the Clean I/O, refraining
from using this pseudo-imperative style:
 # object = doSomethingWith object
 # object = andMoreProcessingOf object
...

and constructing monadic chains, I finally gave up, because my 
fingers generated too many bugs. But this is a personal observation,
I am sure that more disciplined people can do it better.



Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France