[erlang-questions] wxErlang question 1

[Joe Armstrong]

On Mon, Jul 3, 2017 at 1:09 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED> wrote:
> For me, the gold standard remains Interlisp-D.
> Interlisp reference manual, 1983 edition (I have it beside me
> still), chapter 19 "Interlisp-D Display Facilities".
> 50 pages.  Complete. Day 1: I've never written any graphics
> code in my life.  Read the chapter.  Day 2: read it again.
> Day 3: try some small examples.   Day 5: multipane graphic
> debugger for the Prolog "microcode" complete.  The nearest
> I've ever found is Tcl/Tk.

Tcl/Tk was (is) great (bar some rather strange quirks)

>
> Do the wxWindows tutorials help at all?
> For me, http://docs.wxwidgets.org/stable/overview_helloworld.html
> convinced me to stay away.

The examples are horrible - an application seem to consist of a number specific
classes which override or extends the behaviour of the standard classes.

My problem here is that the standard classes do zillions of things and
which methods
must be overridden or extended to achieve somethings is unobvious.

In my opinion use of callbacks and an event loop is the wrong way to
do graphics -
wxWidgets (and friends) seem to me to be extremely complex ways of
hiding concurrency
and replacing it with callbacks and an event loop.

Every time I get locked into a modal window I think - "yet another
concurrency failure"

A typical example is a program that has a form and an account
preferences page. When I'm filling in the form I need some detail that
is the account preferences - but I can't access this until
I've filled in the form - a typical concurrency error.

I think it might be possible to tame wxErlang but right now I can't
figure out how to even do simple
things.

/Joe



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