Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why binding to existing widget toolkits doesn't make any sense

On Mon, 2009-02-02 at 13:28 -0800, Conal Elliott wrote:

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Creighton Hogg wrote: 2009/1/29 Conal Elliott : > Hi Achim, > > I came to the same conclusion: I want to sweep aside these OO, imperative > toolkits, and replace them with something "genuinely functional", which for > me means having a precise & simple compositional (denotational) semantics. > Something meaningful, formally tractable, and powefully compositional from > the ground up. As long as we build on complex legacy libraries (Gtk, > wxWidgets, Qt, OpenGL/GLUT, ...), we'll be struggling against (or worse yet, > drawn into) their ad hoc mental models and system designs. > > As Meister Eckhart said, "Only the hand that erases can write the true > thing."

I think working on a purely functional widget toolkit would actually be a really cool project. Do you have any ideas, though, on what should be the underlying primitives?

Again, my goal would not be a "purely functional" library, because even IO is "purely functional". My goal is a "denotational" library, i.e., one that has an elegant (denotational) semantics, and hence is powerfully compositional and good for reasoning.

+1 jcc