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I am a tad too young to have encountered it, I was picking up X programming in the wave where motif was heading out. I remember Xt/Xaw which I believe had some

I am a tad too young to have encountered it, I was picking up X programming in the wave where motif was heading out. I remember Xt/Xaw which I believe had some commonalities with Motif. Then the first version of gtk I played with was 1.x.

DonHopkins 7y ago
The genius of TCL/Tk, and the reason I believe Tk was so incredibly successful despite the flaws and shortcomings of TCL, is that toolkits like Motif, based on the X Toolkit Intrinsics, that aren't written AROUND an existing extension language, end up getting fucked by Greenspun's Tenth Rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule >"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." -Philip Greenspun's Tenth Rule The X Toolkit ends up needing to do all of these dynamic-scripting-language-like things, like resolving names and paths, binding events to handlers, calculating expressions, and instantiating objects based on resource data. So if it doesn't already start out with a standardized scripting language to use for that, it has to duplicate all that dynamic almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike-half-of-Common-Lisp stuff itself. Case in point: Motif's infamous UIL (because X resource files weren't half-assed enough). https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/hpox/uil-sux.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/hpox/uil... And then when you do get around to plugging that toolkit into some other scripting language (the way WINTERP plugged Motif/Xt into XLisp, or GTK/GObject plugs into Python for that matter), now you have two or more fat bloated complex buggy poorly documented incompatible impedance-mismatched half-assed competing layers of middleware and object models tripping over each other's feet and spraying each other with seltzer bottles like the Three Stooges. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO9RP4QEZKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO9RP4QEZKU https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22610342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22610342 >Speaking of the plague, does it support UIL? ;) >Neils Mayer described WINTERP (XLisp + Motif) as: You might think of such functionality as "client-side NeWS without the postscript imaging model". http://nielsmayer.com/winterp/ http://nielsmayer.com/winterp/ >Don Hopkins wrote to a comp.human-factors discussion about "Info on UIL (User Interface Language)" on January 22, 1993: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.human-factors/R3wfh90HMss/WR1-qmjnNJIJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.human-factors/R3wfh90HM... >Here are some classic messages about UIL. Avoid it like the plague. [...]

DonHopkins 7y ago

The genius of TCL/Tk, and the reason I believe Tk was so incredibly successful despite the flaws and shortcomings of TCL, is that toolkits like Motif, based on the X Toolkit Intrinsics, that aren't written AROUND an existing extension language, end up getting fucked by Greenspun's Tenth Rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule >"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." -Philip Greenspun's Tenth Rule The X Toolkit ends up needing to do all of these dynamic-scripting-language-like things, like resolving names and paths, binding events to handlers, calculating expressions, and instantiating objects based on resource data. So if it doesn't already start out with a standardized scripting language to use for that, it has to duplicate all that dynamic almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike-half-of-Common-Lisp stuff itself. Case in point: Motif's infamous UIL (because X resource files weren't half-assed enough). https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/hpox/uil-sux.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/hpox/uil... And then when you do get around to plugging that toolkit into some other scripting language (the way WINTERP plugged Motif/Xt into XLisp, or GTK/GObject plugs into Python for that matter), now you have two or more fat bloated complex buggy poorly documented incompatible impedance-mismatched half-assed competing layers of middleware and object models tripping over each other's feet and spraying each other with seltzer bottles like the Three Stooges. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO9RP4QEZKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO9RP4QEZKU https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22610342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22610342 >Speaking of the plague, does it support UIL? ;) >Neils Mayer described WINTERP (XLisp + Motif) as: You might think of such functionality as "client-side NeWS without the postscript imaging model". http://nielsmayer.com/winterp/ http://nielsmayer.com/winterp/ >Don Hopkins wrote to a comp.human-factors discussion about "Info on UIL (User Interface Language)" on January 22, 1993: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.human-factors/R3wfh90HMss/WR1-qmjnNJIJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.human-factors/R3wfh90HM... >Here are some classic messages about UIL. Avoid it like the plague. [...]