Michael P Mossey wrote:
Hello, I'm totally new to Haskell. I'm thinking of using it for a personal project, which is a gui-based musical score editor. (*) Why Haskell? I've always been interested in proving my software's correctness, usually in practical and informal sense. In other words, I would like to reduce bugs by having a really good understanding of what my software does. I also just want to learn Haskell.
Before I invest a lot of time in learning Haskell, however, I want to understand if it's the right language for doing a gui-based musical score editor. First of all, I need a gui toolkit of some sort, and I notice that bindings to Qt exist. I'm already very familiar with Qt, so that's good. I also need to access the Windows midi api, and I see there is a module called hmidi.
However, a gui program is essentially event driven and heavily interacts with the outside world. I don't know how compatible these ideas are with Haskell.
If I don't use Haskell, I will probably use Python, which I already know well. So basically the question is: Haskell or Python? Note: I would enjoy learning Haskell, so this is not a question of which language is better in an absolute sense... if Haskell is suitable, but not the best choice, I will still probably use it.
Thanks, Mike
(*) For those who ask why I'm doing my own music score editor when many already exist, it's because it needs to be integrated with my own computer-assisted composition system. As an editor, it will be primitive: that's not its main purpose. _______________________________________________ Hi Michael - I'm also new to Haskell. Although I can't really give a definitive answer as to whether Haskell is appropriate for GUIs, I can mention several GUI libraries that exist for Haskell. They are wxHaskell, Gtk2Hs and qtHaskell. The following page mentions those and a number of others - http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applications_and_libraries/GUI_libraries
Note - that page says that "there is no standard (GUI lib) and all are more or less incomplete." Don't be too put off by that - from what I've seen, although I haven't used them myself, both wxHaskell and Gtk2HS now seem to be quite complete. I can't really comment on qtHaskell as I haven't seen that in action. - Hope this helps.... - Andy