Writing on the wall

[Mark Leisher <mleisher crl nmsu edu>]

This isn't specifically about GTK, but does provide some lessons.  The Monday,
July 31 article on http://www.suck.com is just one of the more public salvos
about going too far with a product.

One of the benefits of being around the Net for about 20 years is I get to see
the cycles.  This backlash against complexity (what we coders tend to think of
as sophistication) is much like the one that gave birth to HTML.  HTML killed
WAIS because WAIS was bloated with features necessary to make "good"
information retrieval much more possible.

So my last bit of advice is to keep your eye on projects that adhere to the
philosophy of small and simple, such as FLTK.  They may seem limited compared
to your current toolbox, but the new generation of programmers will dump
Swing, Xt, Motif, Gtk/Gnome in a heartbeat if anything simpler approximates
what they want.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Leisher
Computing Research Lab            Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a
New Mexico State University       life without struggle, you are equipped
Box 30001, Dept. 3CRL             with the basic means of salvation.
Las Cruces, NM  88003                            -- Tennessee Williams