Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

So, I am missing how this would work. Let me pick 2 examples.

The first is about networking. How would I build, say, an http server in this thing? From the rest of this thread, it seems like you would advocate essentially a separate compiler for networking, and to 'read' from a socket, you just import. That seems like you are moving a lot of complexity to the world of compilers.

Moreover, I don't see any way to then 'write' to that socket. Does the compiler essentially take a return value of main and then say 'well, guess this is what I want to send back'. That would suggest you can't do something like 'recieve handshake' 'send handshake' 'receive request' 'respond to request'. It seems to block interspersing input with output.

My second example is a gui. It feels to me like your program couldn't in any way define the interface layout. All it could do is 'receive' and 'issue' events. It would take a specialized compiler, and a whole separate mark-up language to actually define the interface. How do you change the interface in response to input?

I love pure code, and see the value in pushing the boundary of pure code as close to the edges as possible. However, code still needs side-effects to be useful, and I'd like to specify those side-effects in the same language as I specify my pure code. I'd like to decide for myself how far out to push the boundary of purity.

Yes, this entails moving more logic into compilers/interpreters. For example, Dhall is actually designed this way: not only is it a command line interpreter but it's also a Haskell library that you can use to interpret Dhall expressions and marshal them into Haskell programs. So the Haskell language combined with the Dhall library becomes an "interpreter builder": a way to crank out a large number of specialized applications that are customized via an effect-free programmable configuration language

For the specific example of a server, there would be two layers:

* in Haskell you would implement a server configured by a Dhall expression (i.e. a hybrid server/interpreter)

* end users program in Dhall, not Haskell

* end users provide a record of pure functions (one for each API endpoint) that translate user input to output

However, I think that's still just a superficial answer to the question. The next level is to ask: why do we even need a server? A server is just a way to distribute values, but Dhall already has a way to distribute values (and code): we just import them by reference. So why not just use that directly instead of standing up a server to reimplement what the Dhall interpreter already does internally

You can encode markup in a purely functional languages. That's actually the easy part since you can treat it as an ordinary data structure. Actually, the harder part is coming up with a user-friendly way to transform a stream of events into a stream of outputs within a purely functional language. In my opinion, there is no clear consensus on the "right" way to do this, but the field of functional reactive programming is based on searching for clean solutions to this problem

However, again, you need to step back and ask: what did we need this GUI for? In some cases, the GUI is the requirement (like in a game) so there's not much you can do to simplify things. However, in other cases -the GUI is just a poor man's interface to composing values and code, in which case we might just be able to replace it with importing URLs and paths using Dhall's built-in mechanisms (and perhaps replace all these bespoke GUIs with a general purpose GUI for manipulating Dhall expressions)

You say 'importing urls', but what is going to serve the content at that URL? A server.

I dont know what it means by saying there is no input or output... reading from a URL is an input. It is an I/O operation to pull data from a network stream.

Even the whole writing functions to files things is an input and output situation. Just because you change the words doesn't change what it is doing.

Yes, but it's a restricted set of input and output: the only thing you can do is import other code. You can't, say, launch missiles or delete files unless the compiler/interpreter allows it

> My second example is a gui. It feels to me like your program couldn't in any way define the interface layout. All it could do is 'receive' and 'issue' events. It would take a specialized compiler, and a whole separate mark-up language to actually define the interface. How do you change the interface in response to input?

As one example, the program might be written in model-view-controller style:

* Your "model" is a type `Model`.

* Your "view" is a function of type `Model -> Display`.

* Your "controller" is a function of type `(Model * Event) -> Model`.

The runtime is responsible for feeding your controller events to get a new model, then running your view on the new model to create a display, then actually rendering that display.

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