Hi Claus, On Monday 18 June 2007 18:14:58 Claus Reinke wrote:
Having just presented a case for the possible rationality of the irrational decision of creating an Emacs-like IDE in Haskell, I wonder if we should not be even more irrational and contemplate the possibility of using Haskell to create a radically different kind of IDE.. New technologies are often used to imitate and reimplement the artefacts of previous technologies.
don't underestimate those "previous" technologies, though. given your you're almost certain to find this interesting: Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment
Thanks for the reference. I actually knew about Croquet but I thought of it mostly as an "open-source second life" because of its emphasys on shared 3D worlds but you are quite right, it might also be useful for cooperative software development. I must admit that my dream doesn't go so far, I was more thinking about Web/Web services kind of technology to integrate distributed traditional development text-based tools (editors, compilers, etc.) plus a configurable Web based UI.
if you look closely, you'll see that croquet is implemented in squeak, which in turn is a re-implementation of one of the ancient smalltalks.
squeak is by no means the ideal implementation language for this kind of project, nor am i completely convinced by the synchronous approach used for croquet. but while implementation of croquet in squeak is obviously doable, i see various difficulties for doing the same in haskell.
where squeak is too dynamic/imperative/flexible, haskell is too static/unreflective/limited (ever tried to pass functions through haskell's i/o interface?
Is this really a limitation of the language proper or just of its implementations? Is there any fundamental reasons why Haskell functions/closures cannot be serialised? I believe that this is precisely what the distributed version of GHC used to do. Most languages, even Java, have a reflection capability to dynamically inspect an object. It is surprising that Haskell doesn't offer it. ...
persistence [many starts, no finish
Have you checked the prevayler-inspired approach implemented in HAppS ?
, but see Clean's first class i/o]
What advantages does it provide?
reflection/meta-programming [Data/Typeable, template haskell..; meta ml?]). one dream would be successors to haskell and croquet so that croquet' could be implemented in haskell''.
Is just the lack of reflection in Haskell that you miss? Or there are other things as well? best, titto