[plt-scheme] Planned changes for PLT Scheme 4.0

Matthew has responded to the OO style but I'd like to add two points:

1. It is a serious misunderstanding to think that OO means  
imperative. Only the people who have turned OO into mainstream  
programming techniques have made it much more imperative than Scheme.  
In principle, there is no difference in imperativeness for Scheme and  
any good OOP language. It's purely a part of our social history that  
people continue teaching and practicing OOP with side effects.

2. One could imagine eliminating stateful objects gradually from MrEd  
and moving to an applicative world. I asked Carl Eastlund to look  
into this idea, quite a while back. Specifically, how would you  
generalize world.ss to implement a general applicative OO GUI  
framework. Carl turned to slidebar events first (or one of the first)  
and boy, it all turns into one huge algorithmic research problem.

My conjecture is that what we need is a GUI-oriented Okasaki before  
we can tackle this again. Our attempt failed.

Given that, I agree with Matthew that programming the GUI framework  
is fine and almost elegant.

Last one along those lines: the linguistic problem is whether there  
is a meta-circular or bootstrapping approach to creating good GUIs,  
the way we create good compilers.

On Nov 18, 2007, at 1:24 PM, Ivanyi Peter wrote:

> I also would like to mention, that I have indicated to Matthew that  
> I am willing to try to do
> something with the GUI in PLT-Scheme, so I am open for suggestions,  
> help, etc.
> (I am not nominating myself as leader in this, but I would like to  
> do something, so
> if somebody has more time I am also willing to join another effort.)
> As I understand, as Matthew indicated, we have to fulfill one very  
> important criteria with
> the new GUI, that it should be able to run Dr-Scheme almost without  
> a hitch or with a
> very simple porting. As I have said above, I prefer the current  
> way, inheritance,
> overriding, so I would still follow that, and this is another  
> reason for something like
> wxWindows.

Ivanyi, if you really wanted to tackle this issue, you may wish to  
study the Son of the Lisp machine paper from 1999 that Matthew  
presented in Paris. Then as you experiment with the MrEd code base,  
try to get the new wxWindows version to accomplish just that much. If  
you can, turn it into an open-source project for a while and I bet  
other people here will help you with this task.

-- Matthias