Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[Iain Buclaw]

On 2 September 2013 22:14, Ramon <spam at thanks.no> wrote:
> On Monday, 2 September 2013 at 21:04:24 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> On 9/2/2013 1:36 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>>
>>> It's things like this "keyhole interface", that caused me to be
>>> convinced that the GUI emperor has no clothes, and to turn to CLI-only
>>> development.
>>
>>
>> One of the giant failures of the GUI interface, and that VS suffers from,
>> too, is when you need to do repetitive operations.
>>
>> On the CLI, I constantly use the history list, and I constantly write
>> throwaway scripts to automate what I'm doing at the moment. It makes
>> everything I do, no matter how obscure, only 2 or 3 keypresses.
>>
>> With VS, or any GUI, if there's not a button to do it, I'm reduced to:
>>
>> move mouse
>> click
>> move mouse
>> click
>> move mouse
>> type
>> move mouse
>> click
>> type
>>
>> to get something done. And if I want to do it again, I have to repeat that
>> process. After the 10th time, it's gaaaaahhh I hate it and go back to the
>> CLI.
>>
>> I scan a lot of photos. I have a GUI photo editor. A common thing I do is
>> straighten the photos, because they never go through the scanner straight.
>> So it's:
>>
>> right shift click on the picture
>> select open with
>> select photoeditor
>> select edit
>> select rotate
>> select autorotate
>> select apply
>> select save
>> select exit
>>
>> Sounds easy, right? It is easy. Now do it to 1000 photos. With a command
>> line tool:
>>
>> write a script that does it to one picture, name it cc.bat
>>
>> do:
>>    dir/b *.jpg >doit.bat
>>
>> open the file and use the macro feature to prepend "cc " to each file
>> name, maybe 10 keystrokes
>>
>> execute the script
>>
>> Done! And CLI Clint goes and surfs the n.g. while GUI Gus has just gotten
>> to picture 4, only 996 more to go!
>
>
> I'm not that big fan of "full" Guis either and try to stick to slick ones.
>
> But for fairness sake: Better Gui Programms (read: way too few) have Macro
> facilities.
>
> (My major reason to go GUI for programming is the auto*
> /configure/m4/makefile mess. Having that handled by some build in magic is
> cool. Which, if I'm not mistaken is less of an issue with D (dub, etc?))
>
> A+ -R


Autotools is only as much of a mess as you make it.  I prefer it
because it is versatile and portable.

Versatile - ie: Debian rules.conf files used to build binary pacakges
from source are built ontop of the make system... there are 40,000+
packages for all sorts of applications built by them.
Portable - ie: If I give you a set of sources and a configure/Makefile
to build them, I can happily guarantee you can put it on a machine
powered by SPARC, ARM, MIPS, Xtensa... and the tools will be available
for you to at least configure the sources, and hopefully build (so
long as was written to be portable :)


-- 
Iain Buclaw

*(p < e ? p++ : p) = (c & 0x0f) + '0';