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To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Subject: Re: Lesstif (motif compatible) package. 
Cc: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard), alk@Think.COM,
        hackers@freefall.freebsd.org
In-reply-to: Your message of Thu, 11 Apr 1996 19:22:47 PDT
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 23:10:26 -0600
From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
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: Wrongo.  I'm going to say that using custom frobs is bad, and that
: if you need a triangular button, your user interface design is bad.
: If you succeed in creating your little triangle, where in the users
: previous training does the information on how to use it come from?

Hmmm.  We found in OI that when you customized the toolkit (as a user)
then you would be able to 1) reuse code all over the place, and 2)
enforce more easily style guides built on top of OSF/Motif.  Many
companies have additional rules based on their business practices that
work well in code.  If you have 50 screens for doing, say, stock
market things, then having one entry field that knows how to deal with
the various conventions of price in all of them is a good thing,
rather than 50 slightly different ones....

The "I gotta subclass everything, because I have to show how big an OO
(or C++) dick I have" is clearly wrong, but used wisely customized
widgets can be a big win.  I know that I eliminated about 1000 lines
of code from a 5k line resource editor in the builder by making
subclasses that groked the basic concept of setting attributes to
values, then deriving subclasses from them that groked other things,
displayed things differently, etc.  This was a big win and let some
fairly powerful extensions be written that I hadn't originally
envisioned but turned out to be easy in the framework provided.

I really can't see how you'd think that training would be higher when
you wisely subclass.

Warner