Re: [gtkmm] Talk about a major rewrite

[Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer cs nmsu edu>]

Michael Babcock writes:
 > 
 > I'll probably regret this, but... I think the GTK design is a piece of 
 > crap (though I usually try to be more diplomatic), and I am using gtkmm. 
 > The problem with the "leave" suggestion is, where do we go? 
 > Unfortunately there really is no good answer, and this is why these 
 > debates/flamewars come up from time to time over the years.

If GTK is a piece of crap, what's better?  It's so much better than
other toolkits I've used, that calling it a piece of crap seems, well,
stupid.

Is it perfect?  Of course not.  We won't find a perfect toolkit until
Jesus turns out to be a GUI programmer in the Second Coming.

I frankly don't understand why these debates come up every few years.

<snip>

 > Maybe I'm just being too picky, and I am picky when it comes to 
 > programming, but it is striking to me that I don't feel this almost 
 > constant frustration with any other library that I regularly use, such 
 > as the C++ standard library, Unix networking functions, 3D scene graph 
 > libraries, OpenGL, sound libraries, POSIX threads, etc. In all other 
 > cases I can (eventually) perceive an underlying concept behind the 
 > design, appreciate the designer's work and implement my program using 
 > their library. With gtk I am mostly cursing the simplistic design and 
 > trying to find workarounds to do what I want.

I notice STL is conspicuously absent from the above list...  now,
THERE'S a piece of crap (pulling the trigger on my flamethrower).

My own reaction, in general, is that I like a fully imperative
programming model, I think in terms of that model, and I find an
event-driven model is just plain weird.  But all the toolkits use one,
and of the toolkits, GTK is the one that seems the most intuitive to
me.  gtkmm then takes that, and does what I regard as a really nice
job of wrapping that in the language it's more natural for in the
first place.
-- 
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D.       Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science       FAX   -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University          http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer
Southwestern NM Regional Science and Engr Fair:  http://www.nmsu.edu/~scifair