[cells-devel] gui-geometry

[Kenny Tilton]

Peter Hildebrandt wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 9:33 PM, Kenny Tilton <kennytilton at optonline.net> wrote:
>> It depends on whether you want a widget set. With Cello one gets raw
>> control, event, and rendering primitives one assembles as needed into
>> interactive GUI elements. The True Lisp Way, all the power in the world.
>>
>> With Celtk or Cells-Gtk you get a standard widget set but then are locked in
>> to those.
> 
> I just realized that all the time while I was arguing in favor of a
> fixed widget set, I have been walking towards raw control through the
> backdoor:  I think my cairo-drawing-area widget ended up bringing in a
> cellosy GUI through the back door.
> 
> The widget offers a canvas, a basic set of geometric prmitives such as
> lines, arcs, rectangles, and text, and some interactive functionality
> such as propagating drag and drop, select, and click events.  Then I
> use the primitives to create my own widgets, in my case edges and
> vertices in a graph.  Other (gtk) widgets such as a list view show the
> data of the currently selected graph element and enable the user to
> change the properties.
> 
> Long story short, designing interactive dynamic GUI elements
> representing the underlying dynamic data structures is the Lisp Way,
> and it is so intriguing that one may follow it without even noticing
> (or:  once you are on the Cells Way you can't avoid it).

Aha! The Unbearable Inevitability of The Lisp Way. Maybe my beach rant 
was not as silly as I thought it was: there is little chance even a fine 
widget set will be able to do everything we need from it, and clever 
hackers will roll up their sleeves and produce ad hoc interactive 
graphic elements from more primitive tools for drawing and 
event-handling rather than ship inferior applications so... all roads 
lead to Cello in the abstract.

The funny thing is that until a few months ago I thought Cello Just 
Sucked because it did not have very many widgets -- but that wasn't a 
bug, it was a feature! So this is similar to your punch line only worse: 
i was following The Lisp Way without knowing it /and/ apologizng for it 
at the same time -- I remember trying without success to talk Frank G 
out of using Cello because of the missing widgets!

Speaking of which, this weekend was a target release date for my Algebra 
app but last week led to a few days of refactoring to do a very nice and 
  overdue generalization of the application's understanding of what 
constitutes a math problem. Thank god for my RDF experience -- instead 
of adding a few slots to a CLOS class I just said to hell with it, 
subject-predicate-object, I am done.

> 
> Or, from a different angle, there's something cellosy about cells-gtk3 now :-)

Have you had this experience?: I started to build the Algebra software 
using pretty much a Tk interface, intending to do Cello just inside the 
Togl widget where I would really need the lisp way. In about two seconds 
I decided it would be a horror programming one application with two 
application frameworks at the same time. Or do you have Cello/Gtk 
partitioned cleanly enough that they coexist gracefully? Possibly 
because of the evolutionary path in which Cello/Gtk was /always/ within 
the GTk framework?

kt