On Thu, Jul 19, 2012, Dov Grobgeld wrote about "Re: suggestions sought for a framework for a quick, dirty, reallysimple GUI prototype": > very nicely reflects the beauty of the GObject system. Especially in C it > is easy to miss that because of the very tedious syntax you need to use, > e.g. to define an derived class. In Vala the syntax is very concise.
This is a very important point. This is why I loved Tcl/Tk when I learned it in the mid 90s - the code to create the gui was so compact, so elegant - the complete opposite of Xlib, Xaw and Motif, each requiring you to write dozens of lines for every simple task. For example, here is a program in TCL/TK which shows a "hello" button which outputs "hi" when pressed. How does it look in your favorite gui language? #!/usr/bin/wish button .a -text "hello" -command "puts hi" pack .a For the curious, the first command creates a button ".a" - in TK, widgets are hierarchical and have hierarchical pathnames, with "." separating components, so ".a" is a child of the toplevel window "." with the name a. The TCL language is a simple language resembling the shell (but with interesting improvements, which I can eleborate if anyone cares). The second command "packs" .a in its parent, i.e., the toplevel window ".". "packing" means that you ask to have .a be placed and sized automatically. I'm still saddened by the fate of TCL/TK. I still blame Sun for what happened to it. sun bought TCL/TK and its inventor John Ousterhout with intentions of turning TCL into a browser scripting language, and then "burried" TCL when Sun decided to go with Java instead (though interestingly, Java NEVER become a language of the web). I'm sad, because I was really a big fan of TCL and TK. I still am. Sic transit gloria mundi. > Regarding the fact that it compiles to C, as long as I have an automatic > build system, what do I care what it compiles to? But most other high > language bindings to Gtk are just as easy to use (e.g. Python, Lua, or > Haskell). I'm curious, why does it need to compile at all? Why didn't they just write an interpreter, like TCL did? Nadav. -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Jul 19 2012, 1 Av 5772 n...@math.technion.ac.il |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |error compiling committee.c: too many http://nadav.harel.org.il |arguments to function _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il