Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 16:26:31 -0500 (CDT) From: Tony Kimball <alk@Think.COM> To: terry@lambert.org Cc: hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: Lesstif (motif compatible) package. Message-ID: <199604112126.QAA01909@compound.think.com> In-Reply-To: <199604112028.NAA04699@phaeton.artisoft.com> (message from Terry Lambert on Thu, 11 Apr 1996 13:28:32 -0700 (MST))
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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 13:28:32 -0700 (MST) > No, Tk is not interpreted. Tcl is interpreted. And that not for > long. You need not use Tcl in your Tk app. But when the next > major tcl rev comes along you can ship compiled tcl objects, > according to the announced development plan. So will X-builder turn out Tk code? It turns out Motif code... xf turned out tcl7.3/tk3.6 code. I understand there are patches to support a more modern incarnation as well, but my sense is that people doing tcl/tk find gui-builders largely superfluous, mostly because the geometry managers handle the layout issues that people use gui builders to take care of. xf would need substantial enhancement in order to parallel any of the commerical resource editors. I know you are quite fond of GUI builders. My experience is perhaps less glowing than your own. (Mine is based on about a year spent inside Visual C++, and a few months inside AppBuilder and TCL on the Mac, doing all GUI-oriented code.) In my mind, any one specific commercial GUI builder does not suffice to make an argument in favor of technical accomplishment, because it is ghetto technology. X-builder can be used by perhaps 5% of all X developers. X developers are perhaps 5% of all GUI developers. That's pretty irrelevant to the bigger picture. Likewise xf is irrelevant, but at least it could potentially be made relevant because it is portable to non-X environments and because it is free, whereas X-builder could not. Besides which, these fancy resource-editors just don't account for much, over the life-cycle of any real application. (They're great for little one-offs, though.) Except that Motif drag-and-drop interoperability is part of the X/Open Common UNIX Standard compliance requirements. A de jure standard which is closed in practice is just a marketing tool, not a standard. Microsoft has played that game for years. OSF is doing it too. A de facto standard which is open in practice is to be preferred, on technical, moral, economic, and aesthetic grounds alike. > The small fraction running Motif. It's too big to ship static > executables. Require shared libraries. Precisely my point. Teeny weeny tiny market slice. Not realistic for commerical products, except in niches. Admittedly, those niches can be quite lucrative, but they are still little niches. This is obvious a problem with implementation and licensing instances more than it is a truly technical problem... you can't build a technical argument on politics. Hey, I'd never cripple myself with a straightjacket like that. I'm making a real-world argument from personal goals and values. That being the case, this is no longer appropriate to "hackers". Thus I shall refrain from further follow-ups on this subject. Still, it's not just politics to say that Motif is horribly fat and a bitch to code. Tk is neither. Well, it's no Twiggy... > I'd like to see that fixed as well, but I'm less motivated because > I think cross-platform is the summum bonum of GUI, and Motif is > therefore not of interest. Win32 isn't of interest as long as there is a requirement to go to thunk code to actually get things done that should be covered by the API. So I guess nothing is of interest? Tk is the best thing going for cross-platform deliverability. Tk is of interest, by my criteria of interest. I yearn for promised features of the future, yes, but even half a cake is better than a rubber biscuit. The reason FVWM is popular is because of the Motif connection. FVWM95 is a new thing, eh. Who knows, people see Excel running with Twin, and FVWM95 wrapping it all up -- then you tell them that it's all free except for Excel, and they might just start to wake up. You can have the last word.
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