The future of Haskell discussion

[Wolfgang Jeltsch]

On Thursday, 13. September 2001 17:50, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:
> [...]
> Let me reiterate: Gtk+HS as it is today is sufficient for
> applications requiring a GUI of medium complexity.  As far
> as I see, despite not covering all of GTK+ yet, Gtk+HS
> already has a wider variety of widgets and functionality
> than Tcl/Tk provides in its whole API.  So, at least on
> Unix, the statement that there is no GUI for Haskell is just
> not valid anymore.  For Win32, somebody would have to set up
> the binding for use with the Win32 port of GTK+.  I am happy
> to include any patches coming out of this into the main
> distribution.

In my opinion GTK+ is not that nice to develop Win32 applications because it 
provides its own look-and-feel which conflicts with the one of Windows. On 
UNIX-like systems where each desktop environment has its own look-and-feel it 
does not conflict under GNOME because GNOME is based on it. That's why I 
think GTK+ should be used mainly to develop applications which are intended 
to run under GNOME and preferably not to do cross-plattform GUI programming. 
I think the best solution for the latter thing is to use a library which has 
multiple implementations based on different "native" libraries like Win32, 
GTK+, Qt. wxWindows (http://www.wxwindows.org/) is an example for this kind 
of library.

> [...]
> Type extensions (multi-parameter type classes, existential
> types, rank-2 polymorphism, etc.) have been mentioned, but
> it seemed that there isn't really a consus as to how they
> should exactly be implemented and whether they are really so
> urgently needed.

I need at least multi-parameter type classes urgently. I am currently working 
on a software package allowing website implementation in Haskell which relies 
on them.

> [...]

Wolfgang