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Which GUI?

ndev42 at yahoo.com ndev42 at yahoo.com
Tue Feb 22 04:26:38 EST 2000 
In article <N6ls4.7489$al3.98760 at newsc.telia.net>,
  "Fredrik Lundh" <effbot at telia.com> wrote:
[...]
> fyi, OSF/1 (aka Digital Unix, aka Tru64) comes with libtcl
> and libtk preinstalled...  and Xt.  and Motif.  and CDE libs.
> etc.

Great news for the future! But it still does not help
the current un-upgraded Alpha machines, nor all the above-mentioned
OS's.

Anyway, that does not solve version problems. Say you downloaded
your latest Python/Tkinter, but find out that the version that
comes pre-installed with your brand new Tru64 is 4.x/7.x?

This accumulation of layers helps us programmers ship libraries
and development tools fast, but they certainly do not help out
the users in the end. Just to get a "Hello world" button with
Python, you need Python + Tkinter + Tk + Tcl + X11, whereas
you could have short-circuited that to Python + X11, if an intelligent
widget set was built directly from X11 in Python. Not just binding
the X functions, making OO widgets and Python compatibility, too.
A next step could be to provide the same OO widgets, bound to
other low-library window libraries on other OS's. That is some
effort, I realize, but looking back at how much has been spent on
making free GUI tools already, looks pretty small.

Every time a new layer is added, new compatibility issues are brought
in. Plus: if you did not develop all the layers, you have to support
any change in other people's code to keep compatible. Any layer that
becomes drastically incompatible with a previous version of itself
propagates this property to the rest of the assembly. This becomes
a true nightmare when you have several generations of software to
support on the same machine.

Oh well, just my 5c I guess...
--
Nicolas


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