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> though I can't even fathom what that might be. One of the reasons why is that the notion of a GUI is ill-specified. Most ui frameworks, including the excelle

> though I can't even fathom what that might be. One of the reasons why is that the notion of a GUI is ill-specified. Most ui frameworks, including the excellent ones, like QT, have corner cases where they fail. It's just that we've gotten to the point where coders kind have it in their bag of tricks to avoid these situations by defensive programming. Until we have a proper model of graphical UI, it'll be hard to make any such language. Think about the last time you had a weird UI bug (screen not redrawing, unexpected behavior, not able to see something that should be in scroll view, not able to scroll to something that is out of bounds, etc). Now think of the last time this happened in a terminal or REPL. We have no model of user interface that adequately covers the corner cases. We do have a model for CLIs. That's why guis tend not to work.

jollybean 4y ago
Yes that's a good point, but I'm not sure if the bugs in QT etc. are inherent, i.e. we probably can fix 'all of them'. You're right to point out 'a' model should be a reference though. Honesty though I fear in attempt to 'find' a model, we get forced upon us this FRP stuff for academic reasons of architectural purity. Despite QT's bugs, it mostly works just fine.
Const-me 4y ago
We do not have such a flawless model for CLIs. Command-line apps have their corner cases as well, and they fail too. Many CLI programs were designed in the assumption the display size never changes, like 80x25 characters. That's not true anymore, users resize their windows, the text in the terminal may or may not stay good after that. Terminals have a GUI state: cursor position, and current text attributes. That state may cause issues, especially when a program quits suddenly, like a crash.
- anon291 4y ago
  > Terminals have a GUI state: cursor position, and current text attributes. That state may cause issues, especially when a program quits suddenly, like a crash. I have never in my life witness a terminal crash so hard that I couldn't fix it and get back all my other state. In 100% of cases, just typing Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, etc, followed by 'r', 'e', 's', 'e', 't', enter seems to have always done the trick.
  - Const-me 4y ago
    > In 100% of cases, just typing Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, etc, followed by 'r', 'e', 's', 'e', 't', enter seems to have always done the trick. Can confirm, these things helped me as well. Still, just because there's an easy workaround doesn't cancel the fact the observed behavior is a weird UI bug. Otherwise, one could argue web apps don't have weird bugs because there's F5=Refresh key which fixes 99% of them.

jollybean 4y ago

Yes that's a good point, but I'm not sure if the bugs in QT etc. are inherent, i.e. we probably can fix 'all of them'. You're right to point out 'a' model should be a reference though. Honesty though I fear in attempt to 'find' a model, we get forced upon us this FRP stuff for academic reasons of architectural purity. Despite QT's bugs, it mostly works just fine.

Const-me 4y ago

We do not have such a flawless model for CLIs. Command-line apps have their corner cases as well, and they fail too. Many CLI programs were designed in the assumption the display size never changes, like 80x25 characters. That's not true anymore, users resize their windows, the text in the terminal may or may not stay good after that. Terminals have a GUI state: cursor position, and current text attributes. That state may cause issues, especially when a program quits suddenly, like a crash.

anon291 4y ago
> Terminals have a GUI state: cursor position, and current text attributes. That state may cause issues, especially when a program quits suddenly, like a crash. I have never in my life witness a terminal crash so hard that I couldn't fix it and get back all my other state. In 100% of cases, just typing Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, etc, followed by 'r', 'e', 's', 'e', 't', enter seems to have always done the trick.
- Const-me 4y ago
  > In 100% of cases, just typing Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, etc, followed by 'r', 'e', 's', 'e', 't', enter seems to have always done the trick. Can confirm, these things helped me as well. Still, just because there's an easy workaround doesn't cancel the fact the observed behavior is a weird UI bug. Otherwise, one could argue web apps don't have weird bugs because there's F5=Refresh key which fixes 99% of them.