Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
Nothing's wrong with ambitious systems! But there's an ambition/pragmatism tradeoff. If there was a consensus about the Right Way to build an ambitious (more declarative) system then we could all go for it. But there isn't. So let the experiments flourish, but meanwhile it would be of practical use to many people to have a stable, portable (if less sexy) platform on which to build applications.
Simon
As a (sometimes quite nervous...) user of the Clean GUI, I assure all profans who never touched it that * It is quite ambitious. Oh yes, ambitious it is. * It is quite sexy, especially for those for whom everything is in a sense sexy. But it is inspiring, and has some metallic elegance. (For some people Robocop *IS* sexy). * It is powerful! === I began to scratch my head. Presumably all this business of local and global states is translatable to Haskell without much disturbances. But I am not sure whether I could monadise all unique-access objects (including Picture etc.) without serious troubles. Even in my short private essays, where I tried to "Haskellize" the Clean I/O, refraining from using this pseudo-imperative style: # object = doSomethingWith object # object = andMoreProcessingOf object ... and constructing monadic chains, I finally gave up, because my fingers generated too many bugs. But this is a personal observation, I am sure that more disciplined people can do it better. Jerzy Karczmarczuk Caen, France