A Comparison of Task Oriented Programming with GUIs in Functional Languages

In this paper we compare the expressiveness of the Task Oriented Programming iTask approach of specifying interactive GUI applications with ObjectIO and Racket big-bang . ObjectIO is representative for the large class of traditional desktop widget based toolkits aiming to provide the programmer with full access the underlying GUI toolkit in a functional style. In contrast, the Racket big-bang approach offers the much more restricted setting of a single window and canvas to which the programmer adds callback and image rendering functions in a pure functional style. We demonstrate that both the Racket big-bang and iTask approaches result in significantly smaller GUI specifications by means of a small case study of the game of tic-tac-toe.