Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskellers hate GUIs!!

On Fri, Apr 02, 2010 at 06:11:52PM +0100, Stephen Tetley wrote:

On 2 April 2010 17:53, Dominic Espinosa wrote:

[SNIP]

...

I ended up rewriting it in another language (due to time pressure) and I'm a little wary of attempting to use Haskell again for developing such an application.

Out of curiosity what language did you choose instead?

Some algol-like language purporting to have cross-platform GUI support, widely used by others in our department. I think the name started with "J". I did not enjoy the rewrite. The Haskell code was a lot nicer (and shorter). However, the application had to be deployed to arbitrary MacBook users, and the process of installing the Haskell infrastructure plus MacPorts plus the MacPort of gtk2hs (which had a lot of dependencies, if I remember correctly) seemed too arduous to expect all Mac-based users of my application to go through, especially when battling the "what is this 'Haskell' business? why didn't you use blub, like a normal person?" sentiment. Is there an easier way? The process of using cabal-install on Linux is similar, but the 'distribution culture' there is a lot different. I fully expect to install packages and their dependencies with a package manager, or at least download and compile a tarball, and tend to be suspicious of binary-only releases. But they are the norm on those two other platforms. It would be nice if there were a quick way of generating such packages.