Reminds me of the classic "Wheel of Reincarnation" paper: "On the Design of Display Processors" http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland-de

Reminds me of the classic "Wheel of Reincarnation" paper: "On the Design of Display Processors" http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland-design-of-display-processors.pdf http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/myer-sutherland... (Good work getting traction on this kick! ;-) I'm kind of dealing with something like this now myself. I have an implementation in Prolog of a Forth-like language called Joy and I want to make a GUI for it that might actually be used by normal people. I could use e.g. SDL and draw everything myself and handle mouse events etc. (I have a crude demo in PyGame that does that.) Or I could use some sort of widget toolkit (I've got a Tkinter demo too.) Or I can use the browser and treat it like a smart display processor. There are editors and spreadsheets and libs and all kinds of stuff. The Prolog/Joy code can stay nice and high-level, with HTML and CSS as the "display language". - - - - Which brings me to my main point: How in the heck is this not more nailed down in 2020!? I first wrote a DSL for GUI layout in the late 90's, I used Delphi was even earlier, and I known that's all late to the party: we could go back to The Mother of All Demos or even earlier. The mouse and hi-res raster displays and GUIs are old but usage is nowhere near settled yet. Is that because the domain is really so intricate and challenging or are we just milling around and mistaking it for progress? Whither React? (By which I mean maybe functional reactive programming or better yet Kowalski's Logic Production Systems (LPS http://lps.doc.ic.ac.uk/ http://lps.doc.ic.ac.uk/ ) might finally start to reduce the churn and nail things down.) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_%28IDE%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_%28IDE%29 )