RE: [Toad-devel] Language?

[Garner, Robin]

> > Please, let's think about UI design in terms of what it *does*, not in
> > terms of what API calls it will use.
> 
> I never said anything about API calls, but this is still correct =).
> Is someone willing to whip up an UI spec or a paper prototype?

Still, choice of platform is important here.  As the (not so) proud author
of a GUI Ratings calculation assistant application coded in Modula-3 I have
a prime example.  The UI toolkit is missing enough components that I can't
correct several of the major design flaws in it unless I do a heap of
low-level GUI toolkit development.

I've also watched discussions on the Haskell lists about GUI toolkit
development, and there seem to be a lot of choices that exclude themselves
on the basis of portability or performance.  Anything based on GTK is great
on Unix, but doesn't port (yet, at least).  Tcl/Tk is very portable, but
slow and clunky - the list goes on.

I'm a big fan of multi-language development (having grown up on VMS, where
it's easy), but particularly with modern languages there's enough
incompatibility with runtime environments that it becomes an issue.  In a
perfect world, the UI could be built in Java, the data engine in Python and
the main "glue" in Haskell (just as an example), but we'd probably spend
more time coping with runtime issues than we would gain.

A saying from the Canberra Go Club: "it's better to be consistent than
right".

</RANT>  :-)

But as has been said, implementation details are a long way down the track
right now - let's do some high level design first :)

RG