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Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

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21–30 of 59 posts

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#21
post #9

How old is this? 1989 or something like that? Guido was probably quite young when he wrote it. Looks like LaTeX? Edit: Someone else wrote 1988 which I suppose makes sense, as the latest reference at the end is from 1988 too. So then Guido was 32 years old.

> quite young > 32 years old As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years?

Consider that careers run from 20 to 70 or so.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#22
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> quite young > 32 years old As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years?

> As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years? You'll still feel young too! It's really weird when you get to your mid 30's and realise that all the 20-somethings view you as old

And later too! I'm 51 but mentally I still feel like 50.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#23
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> quite young > 32 years old As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years?

Consider that careers run from 20 to 70 or so.

Careers could be very very long. My relative was kicked out of academia after finishing his postdoc and has to work manual jobs till the end of comunism in my country. His career actually started after 60 and he died just a few weeks before his announced retirement at the age of 96, teaching 5 to 6 classes a year in CS department.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#24
post #6

It's a neat project. Write cross platform desktop apps in C. Presumably it would not have been very usable in practice in the late 1980s, because of all the OTHER system interfaces that still weren't portable, even if the windowing system was available in a portable way. I can remember the subsequent period in which Java desktop apps were relatively common. They had cross platform UI by default. But the problem was:…

Honestly, "native UI" gets so much worse with every passing year that I don't even want native UI. I want old windows UI.

I saw a screenshot of GTK 1 and the first thing I thought is that I'd rather make something using GTK 1 than GTK 3. Unfortunately I asked an AI chatbot about it and they advised against it because of "security" :(

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#25
post #9

How old is this? 1989 or something like that? Guido was probably quite young when he wrote it. Looks like LaTeX? Edit: Someone else wrote 1988 which I suppose makes sense, as the latest reference at the end is from 1988 too. So then Guido was 32 years old.

> quite young > 32 years old As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years?

You'll always be young according to yourself.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#26
post #9

How old is this? 1989 or something like that? Guido was probably quite young when he wrote it. Looks like LaTeX? Edit: Someone else wrote 1988 which I suppose makes sense, as the latest reference at the end is from 1988 too. So then Guido was 32 years old.

> quite young > 32 years old As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years?

> As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years?

An anecdote for you...

In Summer 1997 i was 24 at a family reunion, listening to my grandmother and several other seniors talk about some recent interaction my grandmother had had with a delivery person. One of her friends asked her, "how old was he?"

i'll never forget either her response or my jaw-dropping which followed:

"Oh, he was a _young_ man. About 50, I guess."

(Yes, she actually stressed the word _young_.)

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#27
post #9

How old is this? 1989 or something like that? Guido was probably quite young when he wrote it. Looks like LaTeX? Edit: Someone else wrote 1988 which I suppose makes sense, as the latest reference at the end is from 1988 too. So then Guido was 32 years old.

> quite young > 32 years old As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years?

> As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years?

One of these days, maybe as early as your mid-/late-40s, you will be consulting with your a medical doctor and realize that you are the oldest person in the room.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#28
post #6

It's a neat project. Write cross platform desktop apps in C. Presumably it would not have been very usable in practice in the late 1980s, because of all the OTHER system interfaces that still weren't portable, even if the windowing system was available in a portable way. I can remember the subsequent period in which Java desktop apps were relatively common. They had cross platform UI by default. But the problem was:…

Point 2 nowadays feels like high performance when compared to Electron crap.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#29
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other popular option for cross-platform UI apps was Tcl/Tk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tk_(software) ...which even leaked into other language ecosystems like Python: https://docs.python.org/3/library/tkinter.html

Which had the ugliness problem then, although it is a lot better now.

AFAIK Tk simply wrapped native widgets though? E.g. when the result was ugly, then that was because the platform's native UI framework was ugly.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#30
I remember running this on an Atari ST with MiNT as the multi-tasking kernel. It took a lot less resources from my 4MB STe than running X11 did. It was actually quite usable to compile with gcc in one window and edit (with vi, of course) in the other.
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