[Bf-committers] Declarative UI Experiment

[Joshua Leung]

Hi Lars,

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Lars Krueger <lars_e_krueger at gmx.de> wrote:

> Hi, just a word of caution against the tide of positive feedback.
>
> There are two quotes that come to the mind:
>
> "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
> informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of
> CommonLisp."
> Philip Greenspun
>
> and
>
> "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using
> enough of it" (I forgot by whom, google didn't know it either).
>
> The danger that I see is that this ends up as XML implementing "just some
> simple functions like tables from lists" or something and we end up with
> lisp-in-XML-in-python-in-C that is even more complicated than the problem we
> wanted solve.
>
Finally a voice of sanity :)


> If you really think end-users are overwhelmed by the complexity of fixing
> the GUI in python, why not make it easier for them using the tools we
> already have?
>
Good point. Sure, there's the problem of trying to edit existing files that
nobody has solved (in widespread use that is... dunno the situation in
research papers on this topic), but I suspect there are still some things we
can do.


> @Roger: "No Python coding needed, just an XML editor (or text if you are
> hard-pressed)." Full-blown XML is a pain in the ass to edit in a text
> editor, even with emacs/vim and/or tons of plugins. Not everyone who want's
> to fix the GUI has an XML editor at hand. JSON is a partial solution as it
> is less verbose.
>
 Agreed. XML is verbose and inconsistent.


Regards,
Joshua