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? The initial gut feeling I have is that one should just ignore any notion of actually displaying widgets & instead focus on a clean algebra of how to 'add' widgets that relates the concepts of inheritance & relative position. What I mean by inheritance, here, is how to direct a flow of 'events'. I don't necessarily mean events in the Reactive sense, because I think it'd be important to make the model completely independent of how time & actual UI actions are handled. Any thoughts to throw in, here? Cheers, C