bf3:
Wow thanks for all the info! This certainly can get me started.
And yet I have some more questions (sorry!):
- Unfortunately this project won't be open source; if my first tests are successful, I will try to convince my employer (who wants to develop such a graphical language) to use Haskell for building a prototype instead of C#/F#/Java. Can Haskell be used for creating commercial projects? When the product is released, it *will* be downloadable for free, but the source code won't be (most likely).
It can, and is used. See the industry page, http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry they're the big players, there's numerous small groups that have maybe a few in house Haskell tools.
- If my employer agrees on Haskell, and when our first round of investment is completed, we will be looking for a couple of good Haskell developers.
Wonderful.
What would be the best place to look for good Haskell developers? This mailing list? Ideally development will have to take place in Antwerp/Belgium, although we might work with remotely located freelancers. We prefer agile development (SCRUM, and maybe we will be doing extreme programming, to be decided) with a small group of capable people. To get an idea of what my employer is doing, visit http://www.nazooka.com. My colleagues and I wrote most of the software for doing this back in the 1990s, and of course the real work is done by 3D graphics artists.
I suspect the best place to advertise is still haskell-cafe@haskell.org. Most jobs seems to be sent here, and its also cheap :-) You have access to a few thousand competent Haskell people directly.
- Regarding GUIs, does a real FP-style GUI exist instead of those wrappers around OO GUIs? I did some searches but besides some research papers about FranTk and wxFruit I only found wrappers such as Gtk2Hs and wxHaskell that use a lot of monadic IO. It's very hard for an old school OO style programmer like myself to switch my mind into lazy functional programming (although I think I've seen the light yesterday when digging deep into the FRP of the SOE book, LOL ;-).
gtk2hs is probably the most 'industrial' UI lib.
- Functional reactive programming like looks cool (I only looked at the SOE book, must still look at Yampa), but somehow I feel this is still an active area of research. What is the latest work on FRP (for GUIs / games / animation / simulations...)? What are the major open issues?
- Regarding performance (for real-time simulations, not GUIs), I think the garbage collector will get really stressed using FRP because of all those infinite lazy streams; my gut feeling says a generational garbage collector like Microsoft's .NET could help here (but the gut is often wrong, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF3m3f9iMRc for an laugh ;). Regarding the GC, is http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GarbageCollectorNotes still up-to-date?
Well, best to find out. In practice i've not found GC to be an issue. Premature optimisation and all that.
Okay, that's enough for now. More is less...
-- Don