Re: App blueprint, advice please!

[jcupitt gmail com]

On Dec 16, 2007 9:21 PM, Patrick <optomatic rogers com> wrote:
> I don't need much convincing that the
> whole Bash as a nervous system + (Python/C/Ruby etc) as the muscle is a
> dumb idea!

I did something slightly similar (quite) a few years ago to control a
large painting scanner. The program had to control a large robot, a
lighting and filter system and a camera, be easy to modify and be
usable by non-experts.

I did a simple GUI in C++/Motif (shows how long ago this was) with
large buttons for "Start Scan" and so on. Each button launched a bash
script, and each bash script used a set of low-level programs written
in C to drive different parts of the hardware.

It worked reasonably well. As I recall, the issues with the design were:

1) difficulties transferring data between the GUI and bash at script
start and stop time
2) bash's lack of complex data structures and arithmetic
3) progress feedback from a running bash script was ugly
4) cancelling a running script (and leaving the hardware in a sane
state) was ugly
5) performance ... was fine, actually, but I can imagine applications
where it might not be

If I had to do it again I think I'd do the whole thing in Python
(except the very low-level hardware control). It ought to fix these
problems.

John