[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: brick 0.2 released

[Jonathan Daugherty]

> I don't remember it being addressed in the initial release and this
> seems as good a time as any. Not having used vty-ui much (found it a
> bit forbidding to use for what I wanted at the time -- resorted to
> something very spare), what does brick improve upon in your eyes?

I took a totally different approach with brick.  vty-ui is just a 
rehashing of ideas from existing graphical toolkits; everything was in 
IO and used IORefs, and it felt very much like programming GTK or QT: 
create a widget register event handlers, press Go.  brick takes a 
pure-functional approach where it can, making the process of drawing the 
UI a pure function of your application state.  (I like to say it was 
inspired by gloss in this respect, because gloss is a joy to use.)  This 
makes it more lightweight and therefore less of a distraction.  Apps 
written using brick are easier to refactor, more amenable to 
decomposition, etc. than those written using vty-ui.  brick also gets in 
the way less if you want to use the underlying vty library more often.

But if you haven't used vty-ui, then the comparison is somewhat moot; 
evaluate brick on its own merit. :)

-- 
  Jonathan Daugherty