On 5/18/11 2:25 PM, Tom Murphy wrote:
I'd give three reasons for disagreeing: 1. Developing a complete GUI has been a low priority up until now, but now that other, more urgent areas of development are starting to thrive, its time has come. 2. Yes, having essentially no complete GUI support has suited our needs up until now, but these have been the needs of a certain type of programmer. IF the community would like to grow, or would like to be able to use Haskell at work, I'd say a GUI supporting the above would be very valuable. 3. Using the web as Haskell's main method of non-command line (graphical) deployment seems to lose two of Haskell's most powerful features: its type safety, and its speed.
I agree with these disagreements. Web apps have long been touted as a replacement for desktop apps. For certain specific kinds of domains people have been able to realize them sufficiently well as web apps. But I am still of the firm belief that there are numerous domains where browser-based UIs are wholly inappropriate. Thus, GUIs (especially OS-integrated GUIs) will remain a necessity for the foreseeable future. Moreover, for many people, the lack of native GUI support calls into question how mature and ready for serious work a language is; so developing a solid GUI story can be important publicity work. Beyond this, I can't say, since I rarely work on tools that require graphical interfaces. But I'd love to see a nice Cocoa--Haskell bridgework, since that's the kind of GUI I'm most liable to use/need. -- Live well, ~wren