Sorry, it’s not about KDE4 on OpenBSD. They are Free, Functional and Secure whereas I’m talking about Haskell bindings for Qt. \xyz.zxy (I could do)(something goofy)(I’m so excited). Functional language bindings for Qt (and vaguely by extension for KDE) is one of the things I’ve been pining for for ages, but never got around to doing any of the work on. These bindings open up another programming paradigm – functional programming – for developers who still want a good UI on top. [Thanks Arthur van Leeuwen for the tip]

This is orthogonal to things like Kross which are for embedding other (scripting) languages inside an application, allowing for easier extension. It’s also possibly orthogonal (good thing we have three dimensions) to the idea of writing code in a language that makes it possible to write good code for the problem at hand and putting an application together from engines / runtimes for each of the languages that is used.

My friend Bas Spitters does a lot of OCaml / coq work, for verified computations on exact real numbers (the details of his research escape me), and for him, a good application platform would be: Python (with KDE bindings) for the UI, OCaml for the number / symbol crunching engine and possibly an additional scripting engine (Kross with JS, for instance) to drive and extend the crunching engine. That gives you rapid UI development, a good crunch runtime and extensibility; it ties the bits and pieces of the application to languages with characteristics that are good for the development of those specific bits. And that gives you so much nicer application development.

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