Hacker News Reader

A GtkWidget is just a GObject in the category of C-style cast macros , what's the problem? :)

Widget is not quite a Monad, in this instance it's a newtype around a pointer and classes that mimic GTK's own class hierarchy.

It really is a great imperative langue! The IO monad is basically a better C, if you know how to wield the FFI.

It really is funny how you go through learning all these fantastic abstractions, and then at the end your line-of-business code ends up looking a lot like it always did. But expecting your data structures and control-flow functions to behave according to laws makes things so much more predictable and easier to wrangle.

>"Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs." — Niklaus Wirth

No, a widget is not a monad. I think you should rather think of it as just the description of how to draw a UI - it's a GTK concept, not a Haskell concept.

Something that could be a monad is some sort of widget builder. You would be able to imperatively describe the construction of a widget. Then "running" that monadic computation would return a widget, or something along those lines. That monad would then most likely just be some sort of state/writer monad.