Re: Rant! (was) Development process in the Ada community

[dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison)]

"Kent Paul Dolan" <xanthian@well.com> wrote in message news:<5b41d17f3dcf632de26b5ef06daf0650.48257@mygate.mailgate.org>...
> "Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote:
> >  For the IOS, you really need to build everything
> > with a GUI builder. If any Ada is there, it will only be glue code (or
> > in some cases, generated by the GUI builder).
> 
> Doesn't this become a self fulfilling prophesy?  "Ada doesn't do
> graphics well (yet) so we don't do the graphics in Ada (ever). Nobody is
> doing graphic in Ada (yet), so it isn't important for Ada to have strong
> graphics capabilities (ever)."

The issue with IOS's has nothing to do with Ada or any other
programming language. The issue is that IOS's are so complicated
(often hundreds of different screens of controls), that you *have* to
develop the graphics with a GUI builder. You need the instant visual
feedback for what you are creating. Trying to draw controls and adjust
stuff like button sizing and placement numericly with a compile in the
middle of every viewing would just be insane.

As for GUI's in general, I don't think we are in nearly as bad a
situation as we used to be in. Ada's always been easy to integrate
with UIL, which opens up the world of UIL (Motif) GUI builders for
easy Ada use.  GTKAda is quite complete, and can do about anything a
GUI author needs as long as long as they can accept its look&feel.
Better Win32 GUI support might be nice, but that wouldn't help
non-Windows Ada users much.

It might be nice in an abstract sense to have a standard Ada GUI that
isn't quite as industrial-strength as GTK+. But I think defining the
ideal standard GUI with total agreement from the Ada community would
be incredibly difficult; much moreso than a component library.

In my book an ideal GUI would be its own separate language with its
own compiler anyway. Motif had such a thing (UIL), and its compiler
would regularly catch GUI definition errors that would have gone
undetected in Ada code. That kind of thing is why we like Ada for
non-GUI code, right?

-- 
T.E.D.
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