UI, etiquette and OO phobia

[Jay Nelson]

Daniel Dudley wrote:

 > BTW, it is not good etiquette to write private mail on
 > subjects originating in the mailing list;

Unintended consequence of a heavy deadline at work.
My original email said "Have some ideas, no time to
write, think about behaviours" or some such.  I hadn't
thought through any of this, just had ideas rattling around
and have only 2 waking hours to eat, shower and hit the
road or go to bed.  Vlad's reply about building widgets
triggered me to spill the ideas on the keyboard quickly
and roll into bed.  I hadn't formulated the ideas and
didn't intend to type them until I had thought more
about it.  Just had a visceral reaction to his reply and
rambled about what I had been thinking on the drives
to and from work.  It was mostly intended to inspire
him to forget everything he had seen and think with a
clean slate, or just to shake him up a little.

I have been able to keep up with the list waiting for
compiles :-) but can only post occasionally from home.


Chris Pressey:

 > I don't want to be misunderstood

Sorry, I was trying to point out that it is possible to
throw every assumption you have made out the
window and think from a fresh point of view.  When
I get stuck thinking about something, or finding the
cause of a bug, invariably a fundamental assumption
was violated which made the solution invisible to me.

I have a tendency to abuse metaphors against their
will.  The atom / quark thing was more to say there
are differing points of view, not necessarily a
real way of breaking down the problem.

 > I still think that Erlang, in its honourable effort to
 > subvert OO-mania, is in danger of developing
 > OO-phobia - but that is a more general subject
 > than GUI's and I'll try to address it in a future thread.

That definitely is a new topic.  I was a big OO fan
before OO was commonly practiced.  I have a tendency to
get bored and move on to new things and to be on
the fringe rather than in the pack (I like to think the
leading edge, but fringe dwellers have no global
context for relative position).  I'm not OO-phobic but
I am always grasping at new approaches and new
ways of thinking, and frankly am bored with the status
quo of UIs and programming in general.  I want to
rattle some cages and challenge some stagnant thinking.

If I have to solve a real problem and OO looks good,
I will use it.  I am very much a proponent of using the
best language or paradigm for the problem at hand.
I have a reasonable collection of Java classes for my
game server and website management, but I wanted
a better solution and that is why I am testing the erlang
waters.  OO may very well be the best approach for
UI, but I want to think about a different way and see
what it feels like.


Back to the UI.  OpenGL is planning an embedded
subset that could work out well for an erlang sandbox:

http://www.khronos.org/embeddedapi/


Also of note, Microsoft quits OpenGL board:

http://news.com.com/2100-1025-991280.html?tag=lh

jay