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Haskell hasn't solved GUI design, and it probably never will unless it comes up with a better way of modeling mutable state.
by saosebastiao 9y ago
Haskell hasn't solved GUI design, and it probably never will unless it comes up with a better way of modeling mutable state.
- js8 9y agoWhat about FRP? I haven't tried it but in theory it very much reminds me of Qt (which I think today would be called "reactive"), and the Qt was probably the most pleasurable GUI toolkit to write in. I think this has more to do with lack of polished UI editors (build tools) than with the language.
- saosebastiao 9y agoAll GUIs are "reactive", because all UIs (mechanical, analog, digital, whatever...) are abstracted state machines. And state machines are defined by the following formulate: state0 + event = effect + state1. You can't design a GUI without having a state and reacting to events. One could easily say that Qt was pleasurable because it was a well designed object-oriented and inheritance based toolkit. I have my reasons to believe this is objectively better within the context of UI design, and that pure functional programming in GUI design will never break out of it's magnificently tiny niche, but I'm not gonna go into that here. I'd rather just point out that some shared theoretical idea behind both Qt and Haskell UI design doesn't in any way imply that Qt's success could be Haskell's as well. Only Haskell programmers, working in Haskell code, could prove that idea. And if it really is that great, then surely they could do it.