Gour wrote on 2/2/19 3:55 PM:
Many languages simply do not pass 'GUI criteria' and, imho, Racket is very much
deprived of its glory by providing first class GUI option for all those not so
enamored with JS/browser stuff.
Yes, I did another look for Racket last year, and desktop GUI toolkit
options generally seem to have have actually gotten fewer and worse
since the move of most of the money to Web and handheld apps.
(Regarding Web, right now it's dominated by snooping, and by
brochure/tabloid HCI. And, on handhelds and moving back to desktop, one
could even wonder whether certain handheld UX designs being pushed on
some developers for all apps are actually motivated not entirely by
traditional HCI usability goals, but also against the users' interests,
such as for combating the cognitive/perceptual filtering of ad
placements that users learned almost immediately in the late-'90s, or to
promote impulsive consumption of media "content".)
Some languages were simply excluded without even slight consideration like {C,
C++, Java}, some are uninspiring (Go) or have (too) strange syntax etc.
We need to advertise this selling point for Racket: "Our syntax is not
too strange!" :)
I understand the appeal of Racket, though of course there are good
things to say about each of those languages you mentioned, both for
novel PL merit and for practical application. (I used the first 3
heavily, in industry and/or research, and recently looked at the 4th,
and would be happy using/developing it with the added incentive of gobs
of money, though I currently prefer Racket for most purposes.)
1) is there a plan to fill the gap with the 'missing' widgets in the
foreseeable future? (Iirc, someone once mentioned to me 'tree widget' which is
not included out of the box.)
A core Racket person can speak about any plans for core.
What is super-useful for the community is when people develop some parts
of their system as high-quality reusable components that are
loosely-coupled with their application, and share those components as
documented Racket packages. This includes new GUI widgets.
2) how difficult is, in general, to add new widgets?
What I've done recently, as aggregations of existing components, for a
retro smartphone UI, seemed mostly straightforward (and in this case was
mostly a kind of coding that one can do for hours without having to
think hard, so maybe it's a relaxing evening after a day of intense
high-stakes software engineering :) (unreleased, for now)
https://www.neilvandyke.org/postmarketos/
Another option for implementing new widgets in Racket is arbitrary
drawing on a 2D or 3D canvas. Or mixing arbitrary drawing and existing
widgets (like you might want to do in a scalable editable
spreadsheet/table widget, for example). I haven't done this with Racket
in a long time, but I think it's still reasonable, and you can look for
examples in the Racket source code that don't proxy native toolkit
components (e.g., the plot snip?). But, by comparison, the JS widgets
I've had to do from scratch more recently were a headache to make work
well and be portable.
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