[plt-scheme] Re: Visual Studio .NET ...easier than PLT Scheme

I've only evey played with PLT Scheme, have used Visual Studio.NET with 
C# a bit, and know Delphi inside out.  Regarding GUI building, wizards 
are _not_ the answer in my opinion.

GUI Builders are incredibly useful for, well, building the base blocks 
of GUIs.  Specifically, instantiating widgets with correct defaults, 
allowing you to hook events/delegates/anon-inner-classes/whatever 
quickly, and most, most, importantly of all, they allow you to see 
quickly what properties a widget has.

The code-generation side of GUI builders is almost incidental.  Helpful 
right at the beginning (and helpful when messing around with layouts 
etc), so give you a tiny bit of boiler-plate to remind you how to do it. 
    But the power of the whole drag-and-drop component/bean/widget 
methodology is that it is _self-documenting_, allowing a beginner (and 
sometimes expert!) an extremely easy and intuitive way of learning what 
things can do, and what other things they talk to.  And _that_ is the 
power of a gui builder, much more so than wizards or code generation. In 
my opinion (;


James.


Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
> 
> I would hope that we can build abstractions that overcome these 
> shortcomings. That's our business
> -- Matthias
> 
> On Jan 30, 2004, at 12:26 PM, Chris Perkins wrote:
> 
>>   For list-related administrative tasks:
>>   http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
>>
>> At 05:42 AM 1/30/2004, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>>
>>> This speaks for wizards in DrScheme. They'd be easy to add. We could 
>>> spit out tons of scaffolding in no time. -- Matthias
>>
>>
>> Well, I like pretty much anything that helps me code more faster, but 
>> I've never been fond of wizards.  But perhaps I just prefer developing 
>> my own code rather than inheriting someone elses.
>>
>> I find graphical UI editors that spit out code or resources  to be 
>> handy, but I find them most useful when working with one window or 
>> dialog at a time. I might use a UI editor to create every dialog and 
>> window in my application, but never in one big pass.  Instead I use 
>> them iteratively.
>>
>> And, if confronted with a foreign framework, I'd much rather study the 
>> code of a working sample to see how it ticks, rather than having a 
>> wizard generate the code and then tell me just to add my hooks to 
>> lines 30, 1400, and 16041. Burying my code somewhere in a thousand 
>> lines of code I didn't write and don't understand seems to violate a 
>> lot of rules of encapsulation and modularization.
>>
>>
>> Chris Perkins
>>
>>
>>
>>
> 
> 


-- 
James Goldwater
Development, databases, systems, support
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