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Clojure Desktop UI Framework

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Re: Clojure Desktop UI Framework

#91

Post by Zak »

exitb wrote: post #30
trentonstrong wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"is it more natural read for people familiar with writing functional programs? (am I permanently "broken" due to my familiarity with imperative programing?)" As just one person who has written a great deal of functional code, it reads well to me. I think because I am used to reading it "inside out"? Reading lisp-likes is probably helpful. Take 'color' for example. It opens with a 'cond', with three branches. First br…

This is the function that confused the person you respond to, ported to Python: def color(word, letter, idx): if word[idx] == letter: return GREEN elif letter in word: return YELLOW else: return GREY I know which one I'd prefer to grok at 2AM with alerts going off.

And here's what cond could look like in Python syntax:

    def color(word, letter, idx):
        cond:
            word[idx] == letter: return GREEN
            letter in word: return YELLOW
            True: return GREY

Re: Clojure Desktop UI Framework

#92

Post by Zak »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #50
trentonstrong wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"is it more natural read for people familiar with writing functional programs? (am I permanently "broken" due to my familiarity with imperative programing?)" As just one person who has written a great deal of functional code, it reads well to me. I think because I am used to reading it "inside out"? Reading lisp-likes is probably helpful. Take 'color' for example. It opens with a 'cond', with three branches. First br…

> It opens with a 'cond', with three branches. First branch is if the idx-th position in word is the same as letter, return green. Second branch is if the word includes the letter at all, yellow. This is a tangent, but I've been thinking about how I feel when the conditions of an if-else ladder rely on the order they're listed in. This is an example; if you swapped the order of those branches around, the coloration w…

You could do something like this in Clojure:

    (first (filter identity
                   [(and (condition-three) (action-three))
                    (and (condition-one) (action-one))
                    (and (condition-four) (action-four))
                    (and (condition-two) (action-two))]))
And you could write a macro to do it with nice syntax. A bit more work and you could parallelize it.

You probably wouldn't want to most of the time, but if the conditions are slow to test but otherwise inexpensive, it might be a useful optimization.

Re: Clojure Desktop UI Framework

#93

Post by layer8 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #53
layer8 wrote: post #32

The readme says it is aiming for a “web look”, with no intention to make it look — and, presumably, behave — native. As a user, that’s not what I expect and hope for from a desktop application.

Isn't this the case with a lot of desktop GUIs that are cross platform?

Cross-platform desktop UI toolkits generally try to replicate a native look&feel as much as possible.

Re: Clojure Desktop UI Framework

#94

Post by Pet_Ant »

Zak wrote: post #89
ducktective wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I doubt most consumers ask for a native look. It's more like an HN meme. So you're ok with a mp3 player that takes 6 seconds to start up, is janky when it starts, takes 300MB of RAM, every row item is 100px high and every interaction with every UI element takes a noticeable delay on the order of 100x milliseconds? And you're gonna tolerate the same story with the file explorer app, the archive/zip app, the WiFi SSID…

This comment responds to the idea of native look being important with a list of performance issues. Whether software should be efficient and responsive is separate from whether it should look native to the OS it's running on.

Having a bespoke widget tool kit with themeing etc uses more memory and cycles instead of just being a simple app with the native desktop widgets.

Re: Clojure Desktop UI Framework

#95

Post by layer8 »

tonsky wrote: post #80
layer8 wrote: post #32

The readme says it is aiming for a “web look”, with no intention to make it look — and, presumably, behave — native. As a user, that’s not what I expect and hope for from a desktop application.

It’s a tradeoff. You either make your app native but only for one platform, or you make it look “universal” and run on all three.

That’s not accurate, there are cross-platform toolkits that achieve at least a close-to-native look&feel. This is very different from giving up on it entirely and going web-style UI.

Re: Clojure Desktop UI Framework

#96

Post by jb1991 »

kpw94 wrote: post #10

I'm sure Clojure is a great language for some tasks... But, looking at the examples (picked the Wordle one since I know that game): https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI/blob/main/dev/examples/... I find it extremely hard to read. Even small snippets, say line 56 to 74 which define this "color", "merge-colors" and "colors"... then the "field" one lines 76 to 117 is even harder. is it more natural read for people famil…

> I find it extremely hard to read. Even small snippets,

And unfortunately, you won't get much compiler assistance either with Clojure, beyond basic things. So it's easy to have bugs that will take a while to track down in a complex codebase.

Re: Clojure Desktop UI Framework

#97

Post by erichocean »

kpw94 wrote: post #10

I'm sure Clojure is a great language for some tasks... But, looking at the examples (picked the Wordle one since I know that game): https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI/blob/main/dev/examples/... I find it extremely hard to read. Even small snippets, say line 56 to 74 which define this "color", "merge-colors" and "colors"... then the "field" one lines 76 to 117 is even harder. is it more natural read for people famil…

> I find it extremely hard to read.

I avoided Clojure for nearly 15 years because I thought so too.

Turned out I spoke English and couldn't read Russian. But that didn't mean Russian was unreadable—I just didn't know how. It had nothing to do with whether or not it was "readable" or not, it was easy to read (and understand) once I learned how.

After about two weeks, I found reading Clojure to be just as easy as any other code. I did that at 46, so I don't think age is a major barrier. (I've written read and written code my entire life.)

I'm now writing Clojure code every day and am much happier as a developer. (That's why I made the effort initially, and it definitely paid off.)

One thing that really helped was asking ChatGPT or Claude to explain a piece of Clojure code to me, when I had questions. Especially early on, that was invaluable.

Also, learning structured code editing made a big difference—I consider it to be essential. It was extremely frustrating until I spent an afternoon doing that.

Clojure code is "read" differently than, say, Python or JavaScript or C and that's reflected in how you navigate and edit the code.

YMMV

Re: Clojure Desktop UI Framework

#98

Post by tonsky »

layer8 wrote: post #95
tonsky wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a tradeoff. You either make your app native but only for one platform, or you make it look “universal” and run on all three.

That’s not accurate, there are cross-platform toolkits that achieve at least a close-to-native look&feel. This is very different from giving up on it entirely and going web-style UI.

If they use native widgets, they usually look really bad If they just “imitate” look and feel, they usually fall very short of the real thing

Either way, it’s bad experience for the end user

Re: Clojure Desktop UI Framework

#99

Post by chrisldgk »

diggan wrote: post #75
nine_k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most consistently-looking desktop I have runs under Linux. With a few settings and a right theme, all GTK2, GTK3, Qt, and Java apps look and feel pretty much the same, in a pleasant way. MacOS is a close second, with a few native apps that can't decide exactly what a checkbox or a button should look like. And Win10 on my wife's machine is a salad, reminding me of Linux desktop experience from 1998.

> And Win10 on my wife's machine is a salad, reminding me of Linux desktop experience from 1998. This is pretty funny, because if you just use Gnome apps + desktop environment, you have a consistent experience. But if you only use Microsoft/Windows GUIs, panels and applications, it nowhere near as consistent. So even the Gnome team can build better UI and UX than Windows themselves can, pretty telling.

> even the Gnome team

People like to hate on them, but their design is actually really good, innovative and the applications running on GTK are incredibly fast and stable.

Re: Clojure Desktop UI Framework

#100

Post by auggierose »

miroljub wrote: post #46
auggierose wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we've all done it.

No. We didn't. At least not we all. That's just a myth spread by a few workaholic programmers. Luckily, there are enough 9-5 programmers to clean up the mess created by those 2AM committers.

I'll invoke a no true Scotsman argument here.
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