[plt-scheme] Re: Embarrasingly basic GUI question

From: Doug Williams (m.douglas.williams at gmail.com)
Date: Wed Aug 12 10:56:25 EDT 2009

I think we all stumbled through getting our graphics code working initially.
Anymore, most of my programs are graphical in nature. I pretty much have a
set structure for my graphical applications and stick with it.

I think it would be great if the Application Framework were easier to use.
I'm not sure if there are any other gray-haired ex-Symbolics and CLOS
developers like me on the mailing list, but the define-application macro and
presentations made it much easy to code graphical applications.

There are a few graphical elements I've developed that I thought were
generally usable and I've packaged them up and put them on PLaneT - for
example, animated-canvas and table-panel. But most of the useful things are
really design patterns more than reusable code and probably should be in the
Scheme Cookbook. But, as Noel pointed out, it isn't that convenient for
large, application level design patterns. That's where I think a simpler
framework would help.

Doug

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 8:36 AM, Noel Welsh <noelwelsh at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Matthew Flatt<mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> > At Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:56:11 -0700 (PDT), Gregg Williams wrote:
> >> As another newbie, I second this.
>
> My stuff is 99% drawing code.
>
> >> I have an extensive background as a technology writer/editor (BYTE
> >> magazine, Apple Computer) and would be interested in writing
> >> documentation to explain GUI code that someone else has written. It
> >> would be great for someone to devise a list of sample programs that,
> >> together, would get a beginner up and started writing GUI-based Scheme
> >> programs. Then various people could commit to writing individual
> >> programs and documenting them. If anybody's interested in this idea,
> >> please let me know.
> >
> > That would be really great.
>
> +1. I say just start it, and see what happens.
>
> The Scheme Cookbook is quite a good system, but it doesn't really work
> for large documents. Editing text in a browser text box just doesn't
> scale. If what you have in mind is a coherent document rather than a
> collection of short recipes, as in the Cookbook, my suggestions are:
> 1) use Scribble and 2) put the source on Github (yeah, I'm on a bit of
> Github streak today). Git makes it easy... Ok Git makes nothing easy.
> Git makes it possible for other people to branch and modify your text,
> and you can selectively choose which parts to merge in. Very nice for
> this sort of thing. If you don't like Git I hear good things about
> Mercurial and Bazaar.
>
> N.
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