Re: GTK 3.0: an app developer's view

[Paul LeoNerd Evans <leonerd leonerd org uk>]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:05:28 +0100
Martyn Russell <martyn imendio com> wrote:

> Glade has been doing this for years. It is much quicker for an
> application developer to use Glade to define menus, windows, dialogs,
> etc than it is to code then *statically*. I say statically because you
> don't need to recompile your program to change some slight detail of the
> menu layout or labelling. This bears a huge advantage as far as I am
> concerned.

It's a trend everyone has been making for years, and I very much support
it. 20 years ago, everyone was hand-coding assembly routines. 10 years
ago, C was king. Today, more and more behaviour is moving into "higher"
level constructs, softcode, bytecode interpreters, etc..

This is a good thing. CPUs get faster all the time. Memory and hard
disks get bigger and cheaper all the time. Programmers only ever get more
expensive. Engineering is always about tradeoffs between resources. The
resources we have are both computer, and programmer. Because the former
keeps getting faster and cheaper, it makes sense every so often to have a
shift of ideas, a great move where we decide the computer is "good
enough" to take on what we now decide is the boring menial tasks we
as programmers can't be bothered to do.

30 years ago, everyone hand-picked their registers for individual
assembly statements. Nowadays, I bet most programmers couldn't even
identify the register-colouring algorithm in their compiler; it's
something that's just done for them. Who's to say what, in 20 or 30 years
time, compilers and other programmer tools will be doing for us. I
suspect very strongly that building UIs automatically around some
description of the task to be solved, will fall under their remit.

-- 
Paul "LeoNerd" Evans

leonerd leonerd org uk
ICQ# 4135350       |  Registered Linux# 179460
http://www.leonerd.org.uk/