What kind of libraries or toolkits enable the functions of things like [drawpolygon] and [drawnumber]?
what pd attempts to do with those objects is a juicy area.
theres a number of interesting recent papers on the subject of functional reactive GUIs and/or function-composition based GUI description. ive also seen some good stuff on visualization pipelines. combining all 3 is pretty much the penultimate in this area (most other markets outside of us are only interested in 1-way visualization (Eg you cant change financial market history, you just want to see it more clearly. or one-way 3d rendering from some source timeline/scene for movies/games. professional motion graphics stuff is still almost entirely prescriptive rather than descriptive/reactive, just doing what some timeline says to do) and i havent seen any papers on it yet. ok. maybe fijuu/selectparks stuff?..though that seems more high on fun/cool than theory/design
heres some papers to get your noodle tingled:
Crossing State Lines: (lots on widgets and coming to functional/reactive from an OO world) http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/ick-adapt-oo-fwk-f...
it should be noted theyre building their GUI toolkit for FrTime, which is worth reading as well:
FrTime: Functional Reactive Programming in PLT Scheme ftp://ftp.cs.brown.edu/pub/techreports/03/cs03-20.pdf
TCL can be thought of and used like a Lisp, albeit without fast compilers at your disposal, and resorting to upvalue hacks instead of getting proper lexical scoping for free in Scheme, etc.
Fudgets - Purely Functional Processes with applications to Graphical User Interfaces http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~hallgren/Thesis/fudgets_thesis_color.ps.gz
Fine-grained visualization pipelines and lazy functional languages http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/1896/1/vis2006Copyrighted.pdf (420k)
and the related
Meshing with Grids: Toward functional abstractions for grid-based visualization http://www.allhands.org.uk/2006/proceedings/papers/694.pdf
ok, im off to read..