A GUI toolkit looking for a friend

Tore Lund tl001@online.no
Thu, 22 Feb 2001 19:03:57 +0100


Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> 
> I wrote:
> >
> > What's wrong with "ambitious" high-level systems. [snip]
> 
> Nothing's wrong with ambitious systems!  But there's an ambition/pragmatism
> tradeoff.  If there was a consensus about the Right Way to build an
> ambitious (more declarative) system then we could all go for it.  
> But there isn't.  So let the experiments flourish, but meanwhile it 
> would be of practical use to many people to have a stable, portable 
> (if less sexy) platform on which to build applications.

OK, but is not FranTk a stable, portable, unsexy platform on which to
build applications "meanwhile"?  I heard some rumor that it was "dead",
but it seems very much alive and kicking when I run the demo under
Hugs.  Moreover, Meurige Sage says that,

> FranTk currently lives on top of Tcl-Tk. (...) However, it has been 
> designed to be as Tcl-Tk independent as possible. This means it can
> be ported to other GUI systems. 

So we have this GUI interface that is declarative as well as, in your
own words, "rather sophisticated".  And it is not just platform
independent but independent of GUI systems too.  Why ditch it in favor
of some in-the-middle library that will need plenty of work just to get
going?  I must be missing something here.

If someone thinks FranTk is not The Right Way, then do tell me what is.
-- 
    Tore