Re: GTK 3.0: an app developer's view

["Tor Lillqvist" <tml iki fi>]

> 20 years ago, everyone was hand-coding assembly routines.

We were? I think you are generalising slightly. 20 years ago, I would
assume most programmers were happily writing Cobol, Fortran, Pascal,
C, etc high-level languages.

("high-level" compared to machine language, that is. Of course, in the
academic world, people have always been busy inventing even higher
level languages. And some of them have even eventually been used for
"Real Work".)

> Today, more and more behaviour is moving into "higher"
> level constructs, softcode, bytecode interpreters, etc..

The bytecode concept (that specific term wasn't used though) was
invented over 40 years ago...

> 30 years ago, everyone hand-picked their registers for individual assembly statements.

We did?

Please understand that many "advanced" concepts are not necessarily
that new at all. People were programming in Lisp *40* years ago, at
least. And Lisp surely is quite far from "hand-picking registers".
Smalltalk is over 30 years old. So is Prolog. Not much register
hand-picking in APL, PL/1, Fortran, Pascal, Cobol or Simula either, to
pick some old languages.

--tml