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by DanielBMarkham 4291 days ago
Great question!

I'm finding that FP tends to shave the "hairiness" off things, many times in ways I had not anticipated.

UIs are a completely different animal. I've done a lot of UI stuff in the OO world in the past, and some in C/C++. The couple of apps I wrote in F#? I ended up doing a kind of functional-reactive thing. I really like the FRP paradigm for UI work, but I need a lot more experience to say anything useful about it. One of the things I started doing was setting up derived types from Win32 objects. Looking back, with that kind of attitude I was probably headed down the wrong road.

A web browser, eh? that's very interesting. One of my projects does some screen scraping. I found that scraping could be done in a pipeline -- get the page, score the sections, run some rules, do some QA, etc. Each stage did some work and left things for the next stage. But, of course, I was processing many pages at the same time. Rendering one page for a user sitting in front of a screen is a completely different scenario. I think.

Writing a pure FP browser would be a hoot.