Ideas for a brand new widget toolkit

[Russel Winder]

On Tue, 2013-08-13 at 19:40 +0200, Gary Willoughby wrote:
[…]
> truly think would attract many more developers to D. IMHO It's 
> one of the two big attractors* to using any language, i.e. an 
> easy to use GUI toolkit. I honestly think that's why C# and 
> Python caught on as quickly as they did.

Python has no widget set. It wraps and ships tk by default. There are
wrappers for Qt, wxWidgets, GTK, and others. So the Python message is
"use other people's widget sets".

Easy graphics, both UI and data visualization, is a huge attractor. cf.
SciPy (Matplotlib), PyGame, etc.

[…]
> Keep this quote in mind:
> 
> "Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with 
> a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get 
> large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it 
> is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you 
> might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. 
> So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about 
> some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some 
> fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And 
> don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these 
> things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and 
> then others will say "hey, that almost works for me", and they'll 
> get involved in the project."
> 
> Linus Torvalds - Linux Times (2004-10-25)
> http://web.archive.org/web/20050404020308/http://www.linuxtimes.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=145

This is basically a reaffirmation of John Gall's observation from 1975
"General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how
they fail...":

        "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved
        from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from
        scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.
        You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

[…]

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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