Communication with the no-functional world.

[Ana Maria Abrao]

Many people complain about types, classes, lack of litterate programs,
et
I think that what is badly missing in Clean is not better class system
or user interface, but a good interface with the non-functional world.
People often need external data bases (SQL), multimedia, sounds, graphic
displayers, etc. All these tools would be available if one had an
interface with C.

Clean is so good that if people could use it to write software
satisfying an ever more demanding market, functional programming would
be a success. The fact is that consumers of software want more and more
animations, sound, large standard databases, voice recognition, etc.
There are libraries for all that, but these libraries are out of the
reach of average clean programmers. I have seen a beautiful program in
Clean, written by  Weslesley, which generates chords for music, and play
the resulting MIDI files. The author told me that it was harder to
figure out how to write the interface to the midi system than to design
the whole program! Of course, writing such an interface is well beyond
the competence of a tyro like myself.

When will the Clean team make us a gift of a good interface to the
non-functional world? If you want to be the successor of the dynosaurs,
which rule the software industry, the first step is to feed on their
eggs!