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Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

wesleyhill.co.uk

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Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#71

Post by rebolek »

FreakyT wrote: post #51

I don't see any reason why this would avoid the issue with every cross platform GUI toolkit: missing nuances that make apps written with it seem strange and foreign to each platform, even if superficially the appearance is correct. Minor things, like common layouts, keyboard shortcuts, or just ways of doing things in general ("get info..." vs "properties" comes to mind) are a few of what cross platform toolkits never…

Take a look at this article http://www.red-lang.org/2017/07/063-macos-gui-backend.html and see the info about rule-oriented rewriting engine that actually tries to deal with such differences. It's of course not perfect (Red is still in alpha), but it's not something that's being overlooked.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#74

Post by jdonaldson »

solarkraft wrote: post #34
ivanceras wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the development experience with haxe-ui? Is it trully write once then deploy to all without any need for tweaking quirks on each of the target specifics?

It really looks like it by the website, but I haven't seen anyone use it in the wild. I'm interested as well.

The author gave a good overview of the framework at last year's Haxe summit: https://youtu.be/xU142SldYsw

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#75

Post by mzzter »

rebolek wrote: post #72
35bge57dtjku wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like C or like Java with the GC turned off?

C has alloc and free. Red is supposed to be garbage collected, so there's no free.

How come Red doesn’t have a GC then? If Red doesn’t have free, does it just leak memory?

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#76

Post by throwaway7645 »

shalabhc wrote: post #49

For language enthusiasts, here are some interesting features of Red (and Rebol): - You can pass unevaluated expressions to functions, which can then choose to evaluate the expressions any way they want. This sounds similar to 'fexprs' in some lisps. - Scoping is very 'flexible' - you can take a function body and evaluate it in another 'context' which provides different values for all the words in the body. - Making m…

I'm not sure how easy it is to do DSLs. You don't see this popup in the Red or Rebol docs for a reason. It is homoiconic like Lisp, so it should be feasible. I'd love to hear some of the core devs like doc respond.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#77

Post by 35bge57dtjku »

mzzter wrote: post #75
rebolek wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C has alloc and free. Red is supposed to be garbage collected, so there's no free.

How come Red doesn’t have a GC then? If Red doesn’t have free, does it just leak memory?

It's like there's an echo in here.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#78

Post by throwaway7645 »

ausjke wrote: post #39

what about tcl/tk for GUI? mature, fast, and ubiquitous

I've written a few minor Tk based apps in Python and if you look at Rebol (Red's ancestor) it is much much much easier to build a similar GUI. This Rebol guy has several sites where he builds dozens of small applications that are almost freaking one liners:

http://guitarz.org/howtomakeaprogram.com/howtomakeaprogram.h...

http://easiestprogramminglanguage.com/easiest_programming_la...

http://business-programming.com/business_programming.html

http://personal-programming.com/personal-programming.html

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#79

Post by badsectoracula »

vram22 wrote: post #70
badsectoracula wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, a real successor to VB wont be a programming language because VB's strength wasn't the programming language part (if anything, it was one of the weaker parts) but the ridiculously simple GUI designer and COM/ActiveX that allowed people to compose applications out of reusable components (be it controls or just pieces of code). We don't have a real successor to VB (yet) because people always tend to overl…

Interesting comment. Lazarus and Free Pascal are good, alright. (With some issues, as any software has). IIRC, VB's initial code name was Thunder. I worked on VB in a few commercial projects. Alan Cooper demoed VB 1 to Microsoft and they bought it.

Alan Cooper has written about the early history of Visual Basic and how it came to be [1]. Two things i always find interesting was that in his original prototype he didn't use a language at all, but instead used arrows between controls to connect events with methods (i remember seen something similar in an ancient version of Smalltalk for Windows 3.1 that i found in a magazine cover disk back in the 90s) and that in the original version after Microsoft started working on it, it wasn't only the controls that could be extended via DLLs, but also the language itself. Both of those didn't make the cut for VB1, but personally i find them interesting as ideas since they seem to fit well with the overall theme extensibility VB had.

[1] https://www.cooper.com/alan/father_of_vb.html

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