Re: How do lispers do their GUI programming anyway? (was Re: Curses alternative for Lisp?)



Peter Hildebrandt wrote:
On Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:20:33 +0100, Andreas Davour <anteRUN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

As it is low-level stuff I guess FFI is the way to go, but I'm beginning
to wonder how lispers do their (G)UI programming anyway.

You skipped the first two questions: how many lispers program at all in lisp, and how many of those do GUI programming. Now that we are down to a sample size we can manage on two hands...

I've been wondering about this for a while. For most environments there seem to be canonical triples of platform, language, and library that people use (for instance Linux-C-GTK, Linux-Python-PyGTK, Windows-C++-MSVC, Windows-C#-.NET, etc).

....we know why no triple has been crowned "standard", and know also the search must end in vain -- not enough users, and with everyone going interwebby these days it could be a while before that happens.


To an outsider
the GUI toolkit landscape for lisp is a little ... err ... confusing.

I would have said "missing".


My wish list goes like this:

- available on linux
- lispy interface (a dynamic application should be met by a dynamic UI toolkit), preferrably Cells Inside
- open source (I want to see how it works and submit patches if necessary)
- native looks, preferrably GTK or QT, because I'd like my users to enjoy a modern standard look and feel (in particular I do not enjoy the hard edged appearance of tk on linux (I know that one can use skins for tk, but I don't want my users to have to deal with this)

Has the new Tile package helped any? I understand their Prime Directive is to look better and more native.


So what do they do? What am I missing?

I am reminded of the time I was driving to a party with a navigator in the passenger seat who had received the Original Transmission of directions. Following the guidance she read from her notes we were soon heading straight up a mountain on a sliver of a road steepening more and more as first dwellings then lights and then pavement itself disappeared leaving us on a dirt road which degraded steadily until we were jolting and lurching up ruts and boulders and I cut in the 4WD and concluded we had gone astray. With no argument from my navigator I suggested we would need to call our host for new directions and this being long before the days of the glorious cell with no little difficulty I effected a U-turn and we worked our way back down the mountain to the main road to search for a pay phone. Regaining the main road, my navigator complained that we must have been on the right road and should have continued, seeing again an unmistakeable marker corresponding to something in her notes.

No way, I said. If that was the right road they would have warned us that we would think we had gone the wrong way.

Oh, she replied. They said that.

The information you are missing is that your experience with cells-gtk is indeed the canonical Lisp GUI experience and precisely how that experience will change: hard-charging newbies such as yourself landing in Lispville dumbfounded by all the dust, cobwebs, rust, and neglect giving the boot to the war-weary, disheartened, parentheses-mocked old soldiers rolling up your sleeves and setting about dragging the damn language out of the seventies and into the 21st century just in time for the asteroid to hit. What was the question?

kzo

--
http://www.theoryyalgebra.com/

"In the morning, hear the Way;
in the evening, die content!"
-- Confucius
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: How do lispers do their GUI programming anyway? (was Re: Curses alternative for Lisp?)
    ... and how many of those do GUI programming. ... Is there no common GUI library because no one wants to write GUI applications in lisp, or does no one write GUI applications in lisp because there seems to be no good way to do it? ... With no argument from my navigator I suggested we would need to call our host for new directions and this being long before the days of the glorious cell with no little difficulty I effected a U-turn and we worked our way back down the mountain to the main road to search for a pay phone. ...
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  • Re: How do lispers do their GUI programming anyway? (was Re: Curses alternative for Lisp?)
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