5 ms·

How would you do GUIs to make them compose, script, and show the kind of info CLIs can?

by rer 10y ago

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
They can't: that's the price you pay for the abstraction. Smalltalk got the closest, but if you really want to dig into a GUI, at the end of the day, you have to read the code behind it.
- rer 10y ago
  Maybe I should read the code behind Smalltalk. I'm glad the day isn't over.
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  You mean AppleScript?
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    No, AS didn't do nearly as good a job as ST did.
Fr0styMatt88 10y ago
I'd point to the work done on tangible UIs and programming environments for that. For example, the work on tangible UIs eg- Self: http://www.selflanguage.org/ http://www.selflanguage.org/ This is a good demo of what could be done in the Self environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox5P7QyL774 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox5P7QyL774 GUI and non-programmability are tangential things. I don't think they're implicitly bound together.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  However, GUIs are implicitly more complex than text steams. Sure, they can be programmable, and conposable, but it's an uphill battle, and CLI just does it so effortlessly.
  - fzzzy 10y ago
    The CLI only does so effortlessly because of all the work done to make it effortless. Pipes, string formatting, argument parsing. If the same amount of work was put into a direct manipulation GUI as was put into unix, it would be just as effortless, if not more. Why are terminals still based on the concept of a teletype? It is fully one dimensional. You have to fit all interactions through that one dimension. (Multiple terminal windows are a kind of hyperspace, I suppose.)
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      And that one-dimensionality is exactly what makes it easy to compose.
    - dagw 10y ago
      Multiple terminal windows are a kind of hyperspace, I suppose. If only if you could easily pipe from one terminal to another.
      - yetihehe 10y ago
        Named pipes[1] will do that for you. [1] http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/using-named-pipes-fifos-bash http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/using-named-pipes-fifos-...
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      I have recently found myself pondering what would have happened if a micro computer back in the BBS days could have handled access to multiple BBSs at the same time. My suspicion is that we would be looking at something very similar to what a multi-tab web browser is giving us these days.
- rer 10y ago
  Mmm I don't know. Self looks like yet another overdesigned thing at 100k+ lines of code that doesn't compile. After 3 mins on the site, I can't figure out the main thing it does. Sure, the adaptive compilation is nice, and message sends and type inference, but how well do the UIs work? It's sort of cool to see Urs Hölzle and Craig Chambers in the papers section. http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/urs-thesis.pdf http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/urs-thesis.pdf
  - fzzzy 10y ago
    I mean, it is almost 30 years old, so you have to take that into consideration. A lot of stuff had to be built from scratch. As for what it "does", what does the smalltalk environment do? It's a combination of a programming language with graphical programming tools. It does anything it is programmed to do.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Self is the language that invented prototypical inheritance and the Morphic UI framework, one of which (morphic) is now used in pretty much all modern Smalltalks, and the other of which (prototypical inheritance) got picked up by a little language called Javascript, which you may have heard of. In addition, Self provides provisions for multiuser networked UI, kind of like Google Docs does. Given, it's not exactly usable for modern projects, but it's worth studying.
    - rer 10y ago
      I didn't know this, thanks! It looks like one can have composition after all. http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/Self-4.0-UI-Framework.pdf http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/Self-4.0-UI-Framework.pdf
rekado 10y ago
This is what I like about user interfaces in Emacs. They are richer than command line interfaces as you have programmatic access to values (this gives you composition and scripting), yet they also hide information in their graphical representation bringing them closer to GUIs. (Compared to well-designed GUIs Emacs interfaces aren't very pretty, though.)

How would you do GUIs to make them compose, script, and show the kind of info CLIs can?

by rer 10y ago

How would you do GUIs to make them compose, script, and show the kind of info CLIs can?

They can't: that's the price you pay for the abstraction. Smalltalk got the closest, but if you really want to dig into a GUI, at the end of the day, you have to read the code behind it.

rer 10y ago
Maybe I should read the code behind Smalltalk. I'm glad the day isn't over.
colejohnson66 10y ago
You mean AppleScript?
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  No, AS didn't do nearly as good a job as ST did.

Fr0styMatt88 10y ago

I'd point to the work done on tangible UIs and programming environments for that. For example, the work on tangible UIs eg- Self: http://www.selflanguage.org/ http://www.selflanguage.org/ This is a good demo of what could be done in the Self environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox5P7QyL774 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox5P7QyL774 GUI and non-programmability are tangential things. I don't think they're implicitly bound together.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
However, GUIs are implicitly more complex than text steams. Sure, they can be programmable, and conposable, but it's an uphill battle, and CLI just does it so effortlessly.
- fzzzy 10y ago
  The CLI only does so effortlessly because of all the work done to make it effortless. Pipes, string formatting, argument parsing. If the same amount of work was put into a direct manipulation GUI as was put into unix, it would be just as effortless, if not more. Why are terminals still based on the concept of a teletype? It is fully one dimensional. You have to fit all interactions through that one dimension. (Multiple terminal windows are a kind of hyperspace, I suppose.)
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    And that one-dimensionality is exactly what makes it easy to compose.
  - dagw 10y ago
    Multiple terminal windows are a kind of hyperspace, I suppose. If only if you could easily pipe from one terminal to another.
    - yetihehe 10y ago
      Named pipes[1] will do that for you. [1] http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/using-named-pipes-fifos-bash http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/using-named-pipes-fifos-...
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I have recently found myself pondering what would have happened if a micro computer back in the BBS days could have handled access to multiple BBSs at the same time. My suspicion is that we would be looking at something very similar to what a multi-tab web browser is giving us these days.
rer 10y ago
Mmm I don't know. Self looks like yet another overdesigned thing at 100k+ lines of code that doesn't compile. After 3 mins on the site, I can't figure out the main thing it does. Sure, the adaptive compilation is nice, and message sends and type inference, but how well do the UIs work? It's sort of cool to see Urs Hölzle and Craig Chambers in the papers section. http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/urs-thesis.pdf http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/urs-thesis.pdf
- fzzzy 10y ago
  I mean, it is almost 30 years old, so you have to take that into consideration. A lot of stuff had to be built from scratch. As for what it "does", what does the smalltalk environment do? It's a combination of a programming language with graphical programming tools. It does anything it is programmed to do.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Self is the language that invented prototypical inheritance and the Morphic UI framework, one of which (morphic) is now used in pretty much all modern Smalltalks, and the other of which (prototypical inheritance) got picked up by a little language called Javascript, which you may have heard of. In addition, Self provides provisions for multiuser networked UI, kind of like Google Docs does. Given, it's not exactly usable for modern projects, but it's worth studying.
  - rer 10y ago
    I didn't know this, thanks! It looks like one can have composition after all. http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/Self-4.0-UI-Framework.pdf http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/Self-4.0-UI-Framework.pdf

rekado 10y ago

This is what I like about user interfaces in Emacs. They are richer than command line interfaces as you have programmatic access to values (this gives you composition and scripting), yet they also hide information in their graphical representation bringing them closer to GUIs. (Compared to well-designed GUIs Emacs interfaces aren't very pretty, though.)