[Haskell-cafe] "Graphical Haskell"

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

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 at 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