On 8/8/07, Brian Hulley
In contrast, all the pure functional GUIs that I've seen are just wrappers around someone else's imperative code, and moreover, they exchange the simplicity of the object oriented imperative API for a veritable mindstorm of unbelievably heavy, clunky, slow, inefficient, inextensible, hard to understand encodings that seem to me to have the effect of turning a high level language into some kind of circuit board (I'm thinking of arrows etc).
In defense of Haskell (wow!), note that imperative languages are not
without problems in GUIs. In a multithreaded environment, typically only one thread is allowed to manage the GUI, and then you typically need to set up some sort of message-passing system to communicate between this thread and the others AFAIK? This is a total PITA, so if someone has a solution for this that would rock :-) Question: to what extent do the Haskell wrappers around gtk and wxWidgets suffer from this problem? I mean, I havent tried them, so it's a genuine question. (Note: off the top of my head, in an imperative language, I guess one could use some sort of generator to take an interface and generate the message classes, and marshalling classes automatically) (Disclaimer: I havent really searched very hard for ways to handle threading in GUIs in imperative languages, since mostly I either use web pages as the visual interface, which avoids around the problem, or use a single thread, which also avoids the problem)