Question

I’ve been looking at Haskell lately and it seems like a very nice way to watch programming problems from an alternative point of view – alternative to my usual imperative (I have a strong C++ background) view, at least.

However, all the articles I see seem to deal with the same kinds of programming problems:

• Parsers
• Compilers
• Numeric computation problems

I’d like to give Haskell a try myself, by writing some GUI application. Hence, I’m wondering: does it make sense to write event-driven systems like GUIs in a functional programming language like Haskell? Or is that a problem domain at which imperative languages excel? Unfortunately it still takes quite some time for me to switch my mind to ‘functional’ mode, so I have a hard time deciding argueing against or in favor of using a functional programming language for an event-driven system.

I’d also be interested in examples of GUI applications (or event-driven systems, in general) which are implemented in Haskell.

Answer 1

Here’s a couple of Google keywords for you:

• Functional Reactive Programming (FRP), a programming paradigm for, well reactive (aka event-driven) programming in purely functional languages,
• Leksah, a Haskell IDE written in Haskell,
• Yi, an Emacs-like editor which replaces Lisp with Haskell as the implementation, configuration, customization and scripting language,
• Super Monao Bros. (yes, you guessed it, a Jump&Run game)
• Frag (First-Person Shooter)
• Purely Functional Retrogames is a 4-part series of blog articles about how to write games in a purely functional language, explained using Pacman as the example. (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.)