Re: Focus Drive //e woes

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

Charlie Springer wrote:

> RealBASIC builds GUIs with ease and targets Mac (G3/4/5 and Intel), PC, and
> Linux. It takes some fiddling to figure how to actually program -- the
> opposite of doing GUI in C. Every graphical item is an object and you can
> attach code to it in a very natural way.

Much like the frameworks in (other) dynamic (OO) languages then. That
is of course how the NeXT system worked, but took it a step further -
allowed true visual constuction AND code attachment, with the object
network created as a result stored in a file your app would load at
startup instead of polluting your code with (IMHO redundant) line after
line of simple declarations. The key to keeping it maintainable is in
tools which enable easy visualisation of the sometimes complex
interconnections.

But then, I always found the fusion of SmallTalk and C quite compelling
- others will disagree, claiming that the code bloat associated with
generating the same code 15 times to satisfy compile time typing
directives is more efficient (yes C++ guys, I mean you) :-)

It's a bit disappointing that the current 'mainstream' languages (Java
and C#) 'saw the light' so to speak and adopted the SmallTalk style
object model with the more familiar feeling C++ style syntax. The most
critical features necessary to take advantage of the object model
however (reflection and introspection) are exposed via the API instead
of language primitives making them cumbersome to use, and thus not used
much at all. As a result UI code in such languages is full of pointless
'proxy' classes, who's only purpose is to work around the lack of
aforementioned functionality - tedium replaced with tedium.

OK, I'm soapboxing and digressing from the group topic, so I stop :-)

Matt