我最近发现了FP错误(试图学习Haskell),到目前为止,我对我所看到的(一流函数、惰性求值和所有其他好东西)印象深刻。我还不是专家,但我已经开始发现对基本算法进行“功能性”推理比命令式推理更容易(而且我很难回到我必须回到的地方)。

The one area where current FP seems to fall flat, however, is GUI programming. The Haskell approach seems to be to just wrap imperative GUI toolkits (such as GTK+ or wxWidgets) and to use "do" blocks to simulate an imperative style. I haven't used F#, but my understanding is that it does something similar using OOP with .NET classes. Obviously, there's a good reason for this--current GUI programming is all about IO and side effects, so purely functional programming isn't possible with most current frameworks.

My question is, is it possible to have a functional approach to GUI programming? I'm having trouble imagining what this would look like in practice. Does anyone know of any frameworks, experimental or otherwise, that try this sort of thing (or even any frameworks that are designed from the ground up for a functional language)? Or is the solution to just use a hybrid approach, with OOP for the GUI parts and FP for the logic? (I'm just asking out of curiosity--I'd love to think that FP is "the future," but GUI programming seems like a pretty large hole to fill.)


当前回答

The most apparent innovation noticed by people new to Haskell is that there is a separation between the impure world that is concerned with communicating with the outside world, and the pure world of computation and algorithms. A frequent beginner question is "How can I get rid of IO, i.e., convert IO a into a?" The way to to it is to use monads (or other abstractions) to write code that performs IO and chains effects. This code gathers data from the outside world, creates a model of it, does some computation, possibly by employing pure code, and outputs the result.

As far as the above model is concerned, I don't see anything terribly wrong with manipulating GUIs in the IO monad. The largest problem that arises from this style is that modules are not composable anymore, i.e., I lose most of my knowledge about the global execution order of statements in my program. To recover it, I have to apply similar reasoning as in concurrent, imperative GUI code. Meanwhile, for impure, non-GUI code the execution order is obvious because of the definition of the IO monad's >== operator (at least as long as there is only one thread). For pure code, it doesn't matter at all, except in corner cases to increase performance or to avoid evaluations resulting in ⊥.

控制台IO和图形化IO之间最大的哲学区别在于,实现前者的程序通常是用同步风格编写的。这是可能的,因为(撇开信号和其他打开的文件描述符不谈)只有一个事件源:通常称为stdin的字节流。gui本质上是异步的,必须对键盘事件和鼠标点击做出反应。

A popular philosophy of doing asynchronous IO in a functional way is called Functional Reactive Programming (FRP). It got a lot of traction recently in impure, non-functional languages thanks to libraries such as ReactiveX, and frameworks such as Elm. In a nutshell, it's like viewing GUI elements and other things (such as files, clocks, alarms, keyboard, mouse) as event sources, called "observables", that emit streams of events. These events are combined using familiar operators such as map, foldl, zip, filter, concat, join, etc., to produce new streams. This is useful because the program state itself can be seen as scanl . map reactToEvents $ zipN <eventStreams> of the program, where N is equal to the number of observables ever considered by the program.

Working with FRP observables makes it possible to recover composability because events in a stream are ordered in time. The reason is that the event stream abstraction makes it possible to view all observables as black boxes. Ultimately, combining event streams using operators gives back some local ordering on execution. This forces me to be much more honest about which invariants my program actually relies on, similar to the way that all functions in Haskell have to be referentially transparent: if I want to pull data from another part of my program, I have to be explicit ad declare an appropriate type for my functions. (The IO monad, being a Domain-Specific language for writing impure code, effectively circumvents this)

其他回答

Windows Presentation Foundation证明了函数式方法非常适合GUI编程。它有许多功能方面,“好的”WPF代码(搜索MVVM模式)强调功能方法而不是命令式方法。我可以勇敢地宣称WPF是现实世界中最成功的功能GUI工具包:-)

WPF在XAML中描述了用户界面(尽管你也可以把它重写成函数式的c#或f#),所以要创建一些用户界面,你可以这样写:

<!-- Declarative user interface in WPF and XAML --> 
<Canvas Background="Black">
   <Ellipse x:Name="greenEllipse" Width="75" Height="75" 
      Canvas.Left="0" Canvas.Top="0" Fill="LightGreen" />
</Canvas>

此外,WPF还允许你使用另一组声明性标记来声明性地描述动画和对事件的反应(同样,同样的事情也可以写成c# / f#代码):

<DoubleAnimation
   Storyboard.TargetName="greenEllipse" 
   Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Canvas.Left)"
   From="0.0" To="100.0" Duration="0:0:5" />

事实上,我认为WPF与Haskell的FRP有很多共同之处(尽管我相信WPF的设计者并不知道FRP,这有点不幸——如果你使用函数的观点,WPF有时会感觉有点奇怪和不清楚)。

函数式响应式编程背后的一个开放思想是让事件处理函数同时产生对事件的反应和下一个事件处理函数。因此,一个进化的系统被表示为事件处理函数的序列。

对我来说,学习Yampa成为正确理解函数生成函数的关键。有一些关于扬帕的不错的论文。我推荐The Yampa Arcade:

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~nhn/Talks/HW2003-YampaArcade.pdf(幻灯片,PDF) http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~nhn/Publications/hw2003.pdf(全文,PDF)

在Haskell.org上有一个关于Yampa的维基页面

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yampa

原Yampa首页:

http://www.haskell.org/yampa(不幸的是目前坏了)

Haskell方法似乎只是包装命令式GUI工具包(如GTK+或wxWidgets),并使用“do”块来模拟命令式样式

这并不是真正的“Haskell方法”——这只是通过命令式接口最直接地绑定到命令式GUI工具包的方法。Haskell恰好有相当突出的绑定。

有几种比较成熟的,或者更具实验性的纯函数式/声明式gui方法,主要是在Haskell中,主要使用函数式响应式编程。

一些例子是:

reflex-platform, https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-platform 葡萄柚,http://hackage.haskell.org/package/grapefruit-ui-gtk 无功,http://hackage.haskell.org/package/reactive-glut wxFruit, http://hackage.haskell.org/package/wxFruit reactive-banana, http://hackage.haskell.org/package/reactive-banana

对于那些不熟悉Haskell、Flapjax、http://www.flapjax-lang.org/的人来说,http://www.flapjax-lang.org/是一个基于JavaScript的函数式响应式编程的实现。

无论您使用的是f#或OCaml这样的函数/OO混合语言,还是Haskell这样的纯函数式语言(其中副作用被归为IO单子),大多数情况下,管理GUI所需的大量工作更像是“副作用”,而不是纯函数式算法。

也就是说,已经有一些关于功能性gui的可靠研究。甚至还有一些(主要)功能性工具包,如Fudgets或FranTk。

像XUL这样的标记语言允许您以声明式的方式构建GUI。