| What's wrong with "ambitious" high-level systems. Is something amiss | with their basic ideas or is it the nuts and bolts? Are they | too slow? | Too big? Too abstract? In short, why is there a need to | avoid the high | level and go for "in-the-middle" systems? I am still so new | to Haskell | that I have no opinion in the matter, and if Simon's comments reflect | some hard learned lessons about GUIs, I am curious to know what they | are. 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
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
Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
I wrote:
What's wrong with "ambitious" high-level systems. [snip]
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.
OK, but is not FranTk a stable, portable, unsexy platform on which to build applications "meanwhile"? I heard some rumor that it was "dead", but it seems very much alive and kicking when I run the demo under Hugs. Moreover, Meurige Sage says that,
FranTk currently lives on top of Tcl-Tk. (...) However, it has been designed to be as Tcl-Tk independent as possible. This means it can be ported to other GUI systems.
So we have this GUI interface that is declarative as well as, in your own words, "rather sophisticated". And it is not just platform independent but independent of GUI systems too. Why ditch it in favor of some in-the-middle library that will need plenty of work just to get going? I must be missing something here. If someone thinks FranTk is not The Right Way, then do tell me what is. -- Tore
participants (3)
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Jerzy Karczmarczuk -
Simon Peyton-Jones -
Tore Lund