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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

#91

Post by throwaway7645 »

9214 wrote: post #86
throwaway7645 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might get hairy if DSL is non-trivial, IIRC Doc has plans to implement meta-DSL wrapper (a la Rascal) sometime after 1.0 launch to ease the process.

I hope Red puts up a couple of really simple examples on how to build DSLs. It's one of the great things Red/Rebol has to offer, but it isn't obvious how to do it.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#92

Post by vram22 »

badsectoracula wrote: post #79
vram22 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting info. I remember reading parts of this, but not about the multiple languages (from your previous comment) and other stuff, like extending the language itself. Thanks.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#93

Post by throwaway7645 »

vram22 wrote: post #43
throwaway7645 wrote: post #17

Always glad to see Red get some more attention. I think these little lightweight apps are the way to go for sure. I like freePascal + Lazarus too, but I wish they made certain things easier. Red's syntax isn't a silver bullet, but I like how they have DSLs for so many things and native data types for things like email and web scraping that would require libraries in other languages.

>I like freePascal + Lazarus too, but I wish they made certain things easier. Which things? Interested to know, because I too like both Red and FPC (I use FPC to make it easier to distinguish Free Pascal (Compiler) from FP for Functional Programming).

Hard to describe the beginner experience with FPC (nice acronym) + Lazarus and Rebol. Rebol has a lot of sites showing you how to build simple GUIs fast although some things are getting old (had trouble getting the native email functionality to work). So more beginner friendly doc would help both projects a lot. Also, I think it would help pointing out that certain things like connecting to an Oracle db are easy in C#/Java, but aren't obvious to me with FPC.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#94

Post by bch »

jcelerier wrote: post #90
bch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you recalling the 1990s, or contemporary Tcl/Tk [0][1]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tk-Demo_using_Tk_8.6.6_on... [1] http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/idle.html

quite frankly, the two screenshots you posted are atrocious and a good reason to show people why one wouldn't use TCL/Tk

Genuinely curious - I’d like to see a more in depth criticism and/or compare/contrast side-by-side.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#95

Post by vram22 »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #93
vram22 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I like freePascal + Lazarus too, but I wish they made certain things easier. Which things? Interested to know, because I too like both Red and FPC (I use FPC to make it easier to distinguish Free Pascal (Compiler) from FP for Functional Programming).

Hard to describe the beginner experience with FPC (nice acronym) + Lazarus and Rebol. Rebol has a lot of sites showing you how to build simple GUIs fast although some things are getting old (had trouble getting the native email functionality to work). So more beginner friendly doc would help both projects a lot. Also, I think it would help pointing out that certain things like connecting to an Oracle db are easy in C…

Got it, thanks. Yes, there can be such issues, with any project, but to some extent or in some cases, more with open source projects, particularly those without funding or good management - though of course closed source projects are not immune to such issues either.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#96

Post by jcelerier »

bch wrote: post #94
jcelerier wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

quite frankly, the two screenshots you posted are atrocious and a good reason to show people why one wouldn't use TCL/Tk

Genuinely curious - I’d like to see a more in depth criticism and/or compare/contrast side-by-side.

* the spacing between items is entirely wrong

* the bezels don't look native (but look pretty much like 1990 toolkits like Motif)

* In your first screenshot:

- The checkbox seemingly changes size whenever it's checked or not.

- Likewise for the radio button, and the "small" one for some reason seems aliased or something like this.

- The small Tk logo in the tree view is also aliased and let's not talk about the canvas which looks like it's taken straight from a 1990's example.

- The tab sizes are weird and the spacing between the icon, the text and the border is uncanny, to say the least. Here's some example with Qt : https://i.stack.imgur.com/eoHaS.png or GTK: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/pngNP...

- The form containers (Label 1, Label 2, Label 3, Label 4) all have different sizes ; their bottom should be aligned.

* For your second screenshot, hre's another one fairly similar in concept (looks like it's made with GTK), but much prettier:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/7v6Ja.png

The most blatant thing is that the label "Direction" isn't aligned at all with the widgets that follow it. The placement of the widgets seems quite random, too. And why is there so much vertical spacing between the three rows of widgets ? But overall, notice how all the widgets in the GTK one line up nicely and have consistent margin and padding.

As an example I did a rough sketch (without caring too much) of the UI of the first screen shot with Qt. It took me 17 minutes (http://sendvid.com/f6gbp6el), with no prior try and without of a lot of habit with the Qt designer: https://i.imgur.com/4MLh48R.png and already I find it to look more professionnal (except of course the goofy canvas try :p). Another fifteen minutes and I feel like most of the Tk ui could be matched without too much stress.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#97

Post by 9214 »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #91
9214 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might get hairy if DSL is non-trivial, IIRC Doc has plans to implement meta-DSL wrapper (a la Rascal) sometime after 1.0 launch to ease the process.

I hope Red puts up a couple of really simple examples on how to build DSLs. It's one of the great things Red/Rebol has to offer, but it isn't obvious how to do it.

I guess you can start with [1] and ask people in community, there may be a couple of simple examples to show.

[1]: https://github.com/red/red/wiki/Red---Rebol-Dialects:--Selec...

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#98

Post by vram22 »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #93
vram22 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I like freePascal + Lazarus too, but I wish they made certain things easier. Which things? Interested to know, because I too like both Red and FPC (I use FPC to make it easier to distinguish Free Pascal (Compiler) from FP for Functional Programming).

Hard to describe the beginner experience with FPC (nice acronym) + Lazarus and Rebol. Rebol has a lot of sites showing you how to build simple GUIs fast although some things are getting old (had trouble getting the native email functionality to work). So more beginner friendly doc would help both projects a lot. Also, I think it would help pointing out that certain things like connecting to an Oracle db are easy in C…

>(had trouble getting the native email functionality to work)

Interesting. Did you manage to solve that? I had tried out a good number of Rebol features earlier, including some Internet ones [1], but do not remember if I tried email and if it worked or not.

[1] Pretty cool that you can do many Internet operations in one or a few lines of code, and also I like the functional / Lisp-y aspects of Rebol (and hence Red), and the minimal syntax.

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#99

Post by throwaway7645 »

9214 wrote: post #97
throwaway7645 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope Red puts up a couple of really simple examples on how to build DSLs. It's one of the great things Red/Rebol has to offer, but it isn't obvious how to do it.

I guess you can start with [1] and ask people in community, there may be a couple of simple examples to show. [1]: https://github.com/red/red/wiki/Red---Rebol-Dialects:--Selec...

I've tried asking the community before and the response wasn't good. With that being said, the links you sent were pretty nice, so thank you!

Re: Writing GUI Apps Using the Red Programming Language

#100

Post by throwaway7645 »

vram22 wrote: post #98
throwaway7645 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to describe the beginner experience with FPC (nice acronym) + Lazarus and Rebol. Rebol has a lot of sites showing you how to build simple GUIs fast although some things are getting old (had trouble getting the native email functionality to work). So more beginner friendly doc would help both projects a lot. Also, I think it would help pointing out that certain things like connecting to an Oracle db are easy in C…

>(had trouble getting the native email functionality to work) Interesting. Did you manage to solve that? I had tried out a good number of Rebol features earlier, including some Internet ones [1], but do not remember if I tried email and if it worked or not. [1] Pretty cool that you can do many Internet operations in one or a few lines of code, and also I like the functional / Lisp-y aspects of Rebol (and hence Red),…

I was just testing out the language a year or so ago, so it wasn't super high priority to get it to work. I didn't try very hard. I think you need to configure your email + password in the Rebol tool itself and it should work. Unfortunately a lot of the pre-packaged demo scripts call out to parts of the rebol site which no longer exist, so a little bit of bitrot.
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