The future of Haskell discussion

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

"S. Alexander Jacobson" <alex@shop.com> wrote,

> If the GUI is based on the IO monad, then it doesn't seem like there is
> a lot of advantage  to doing it in Haskell.  It seems like a better
> idea to use a more natural language for IO and make RPC/interproc calls
> to a haskell server to get stuff done.

I completely disagree - with SimonPJ's words (I think from
the "Awkward Squad" paper), ``Haskell is the world's finest
imperative programming language.''

Side effects are one thing, but having Haskell type system
and support for higher-order functions available makes
imperative programming so much nice.  For example, proper
support for closures makes the whole signal handling code
needed for GTK+-based GUIs much nicer in Haskell than in C.

And this is not just idle theory.  Most of the code in
Gtk+HS lives in the IO monad and and it's a considerable
amount of code.  I came to the stated opinion after having
written that.

Cheers,
Manuel