[plt-scheme] Planned changes for PLT Scheme 4.0

At Sun, 18 Nov 2007 12:11:46 -0500, Prabhakar Ragde wrote:
> Peter Ivanyi wrote:
> 
> > Would you (PLT-Scheme developers) consider updating the GUI part of PLT-
> Scheme with a 
> > newer wxWindows?
> 
> I know nothing of the pressures and compromises involved in writing real 
> software used by others, nor of using PLT Scheme for programs longer 
> than a few hundred lines. But, in poking through the MrEd graphical 
> toolbox manual, which I've had to do on occasion, it always strikes me 
> as the most un-PLT part of the distribution. All that inheritance and 
> overriding!

No, it's the most PLT-ish part. Instead of trying to fit every task
into a single way of doing things, we try to have the right tool for
the job.

Objects, inheritance, and overriding work brilliantly for GUI
programming. Unlike so many problems, you really do want to represent
something that's essentially physical, and so the object concept works
as advertised. I think it's no coincidence that OOP was born (in one of
its instances) in the highly graphical Smalltalk world, and that OOP
and GUIs became mainstream at the same time.

> I know that this is the way it is done everywhere else, but 
> aren't there ideas from FrTime or the rest of the functional world that 
> would work?

There always could be something better, but I haven't so far seen
anything work better for an average GUI.

Matthew