[REBOL] Re: OT, was Re: What's Native
From: petr:krenzelok:trz:cz at: 24-Jun-2004 0:26
>Well, it depends on the performance/throughput the application needs to
>process.
>I may also think that CPU with 4MB of syncronous cache are hilarous, but
>then when speaking of high performance computation....
>
>Do you think rebol can provide the same functionalities with less
>resources?
>
Maybe, maybe not. How huge are other environments? Tens of MBs? Or
several CDs? Well, we can say that we speak "development" resources, so
noone cares if your VC++ takes gigabyte of your harddrive or not, but I
think Rebol really can provide same functionality with less resources,
where it is capable to do so (provided functionality wise)
>Can you think you can make a tool like Opera/Mozilla with rebol?
>
No
>Yet, you can blame them for being huge and somewhat slow, but they win
>hands down when speaking about features and easiness of use.
>
Features? Well - maybe different characteristics. I can produce Opera in
C, C++, maybe even Java (although I doubt it a bit) ... about easiness
of use - what do you mean? Deployment of strong OO environment can be
pretty tough for programmer. Or do you mean application easiness? Well,
I talked to one friend who told me ppl should not be called programmers
unless they code in C++. I can hack similar DB app using Rebol in less
time probably, looking nearly the same, the same speed etc. Now who
wins? And the answer for me is - the only judge is end user. If he finds
nothing limiting with Rebol app, then it simply serves its purpose, and
I can bet in many cases it can use less resources.
>>- I was OO programmer too. We used CA-Visual Objects here. Objects are
>>fine, but those widgets are pretty well hardwired. If they don't provide
>>you with certain method, you can do nearly nothing to change that. You
>>can override some functionality, but that is all. Once we wanted to add
>>e.g. background image onto main screen, we had to hack two page strict
>>win32 code into our app. Simply because window class of CA-VO did not
>>provide us with that. And here comes beauty of compositing system of
>>View - it is just rectangle area to draw into + event system - you can
>>hack whatever UI element you want, if you are skilled enough. Not having
>>good docs is main obstacle right now, but I hope it will change.
>>
>>
>
>Well, are you suggesting that graphics framework should be made of simple
>point, line, triange, rectange and such?
>
Why not? What is Windows button anyway? :-) few lines, colors and events
hacked together?
>Of course with those basic objects you can do whatever you want.
>But try to have an auto scaling/flowing/adaptive GUI and you'll see that
>the work neede is more complex than tracing simple gfx objects.
>
I don't believe that or you simply don't know View internals deep
enough. Have you seen Cyphre's tree-view, menu/context menu? That is
exactly how I imagine I should instruct system what to do - dialects.
When I work with menu, I talk to menu and don't care about tree-view
syntax etc. Have you seen Romano's auto resize system? NEVER seen
anything like that before. And when I say 'auto, I simply mean 'auto,
not some kind of pseudo recalculations of coordinates (from programmer's
pov, as internally they are simply that - recalcultations).
It is bad to talk waporvare, but I would be really glad if VID 1.3 would
come to some final stage and later on VID 1.4 would emerge, as ppl have
to see potential.
>>
>>
>
>Maybe I'll get flamed here, but... I'm just realistic.
>Rebol is a good scripting tool. But it is just a simple tool.
>Whatever you say about rebol can be said about every other scripting
>language.
>
OK, name some native UIs for other languages and forget plugging tk ...
> And some of them are much more "advanced" than rebol (some of
>them have modularity capacities and can be fully integrated into the
>native OS).
>
true
>Some of them have also better support from 3rd party applications (like
>apache).
>
true, but support of 3rd party is not measurement to what is
architecture about ...
>However I can't see anyone of them entering the main stream as
>alternatives for languages with (bloated) GUIs (or simply compiled ones),
>but they are used as they were thought: as scripting languages.
>
But rebol can be different ... that is just my experience you don't need
to necessarily share. Just show me product like IOS, so consistent, UI
wise, architecture wise, so simple to manage, with other scripting
languages ... well, maybe Python ...
-pekr-
