Towards a native windows GUI

[Serge Aleynikov]

Hi Joe,

Joe Armstrong (AL/EAB) wrote:
> Programming a GUI as a collection of parallel processes is very easy. But programming
> a GUI as a single sequential process is very difficult.

As much as we all like concurrent functional programming, I think it 
would be unfair to reject the merit of the modern Windows OO-based IDE 
tools (like Visual Studio .NET, Borland JBuilder, Borland Delphi, MONO 
IDE /that supports multiple platforms/, etc).   Even though they are 
based on a single process model, they streamline GUI development quite a 
bit, and given the fact that they are backed up by the key software 
monsters, the GUI programming community is quite used to these tools, 
and is very productive.

Writing GUI in Erlang would also require to have some kind of IDE 
(likely also written in Erlang) that would automate creation of GUI 
layouts and interactions with widgets.  Without such an IDE GUI 
programming would be very tidious and time consuming.

 From the academic point of view modeling GUI as parallel processes is 
definitely a very interesting excersize, but if that turns out a viable 
solution, would the open-source community build an IDE for it, and be 
willing to evolve and support such product (which I imagine would not be 
very simple)?  Would it make Erlang any more popular if it had a GUI 
support and IDE?

Serge