[GRASS-dev] GUI platforms

[Roger Bivand]

On Tue, 23 May 2006, Stefan Paulick wrote:

> Am Dienstag, den 23.05.2006, 13:51 -0400 schrieb Thomas Adams:
> ...
> > This is not to say 
> > that GUI improvements such as those we have seen with gism are not 
> > needed and welcomed (they certainly are), but the ties to UNIX and its 
> > scriptability are a huge plus. To abandon this would, indeed, be 
> > "throwing the baby out with the bath water".
> 
> I did not get the point regarding scriptability. Does a switch from
> tlc/tk to python denote that scriptability? As far as I know, it is used
> in OpenOffice, Blender and Gimp as script language.
> 
> As far as I understand, python is high-level language with close roots
> to "c" with a very wide base of (young) developers. It would be helpful
> for the discussion to find out, if there is a future for the GUI/toolkit
> language on the long term (5-8 years). As far as I can see, there is a
> new generation of programmers growing up today with python; but only a
> few with tcl/tk. But I have no figures to prove that statement. Q: has
> anyone reliable statistics to look over that point?
> 
> The thrown-baby-saying stimulates emotions, so it is not really a
> helpful argument. --> I grew up a millenium ago with PASCAL - which is
> dead as a dodo these days - I still want i back *tears* AND I found out
> that switching to other programming languages made things much easier
> than they were in "the good old days".

No, it is about scripting at the Bourne or Kern shell level (Bourne Again 
too). It has nothing to do with Python or other fine innovations. It's 
about fundamental modularity and portability, if you like Jon Bentley's 
"little languages". The archetype is the challenge between Knuth and 
McIlroy to order a text in a file by frequency of word occurrence. Knuth 
invented a new data structure and crafted many lines of Web (TeX and 
Pascal). McIlroy wrote a shell script in a couple of lines, where each of 
the lines was a small program that was so simple and used so often that 
the chances of bugs remaining was close to zero. If we were all as 
talented as Knuth, we could be elegant, but I trust McIlroy's modularity.

As Michael has explained, there is no reason for a clean CLI not being a
clean GUIs best friend, because the clean CLI modules make it much easier
to build the GUI on them. But please don't infect the CLI modules with
compiled (or even high level interpreted) GUI code.

Roger

> 
> /Stefan
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no