But at that time, the three functional programmers were beginning to use graphical workstations instead of simple text terminals. They were unhappy about the fact that they did not have a way to write programs with graphical user interfaces in their functional language.
The two younger of the three functional programmers decided to start working on a solution to this problem. The older of the three was a bit skeptical and said that it would probably not be possible to obtain a solution that was efficient enough to write ``real'' programs with.
The two younger implemented an interface that allowed LML programs to talk to the X Windows system. They also designed an abstraction to be used as the basic building block when constructing graphical user interfaces. This abstraction was later named the Fudget.
The first X Windows interface was implemented as a separate program that the LML program could talk to via ordinary text I/O. The oldest programmer later integrated the interface with the run-time system of the LML compiler, making the interface much more efficient.
Approximately one year later, the two younger functional programmers felt they had a reasonably efficient system and a fairly nice abstraction. They wrote a paper about it and it was accepted at a functional programming conference [CH93b]. One of the younger functional programmers wrote some more about it and turned it into a licentiate thesis [CH93a].
The work continued. A number of improvements to make it easer to write programs were made, and the library was converted into Haskell. Improvements to the layout system allowed layout and plumbing to be specified separately. A lot of distracting extra function arguments could be removed after a parameter passing mechanism with default values was introduced. The resulting version of the Fudget library was presented at the Spring School on Advanced Functional Programming in Båstad in 1995 [HC95].