The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:43 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by sramkrishna
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

The point is not to work on the shell indefinitely. The shell itself it utterly uninteresting by itself.

The point is to have more apps that perform useful tasks for users.

That won't happen if the platform is changed upside down every five years. That's why people are still writing TCL/TK and motif apps, and no sane isv wants to touch GTK stuff if it can avoid it.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:34 UTC (Thu) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link]

We obviously don't have a lot of ISVs (in the sense you mean) - but what applications are you talking about?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 19:02 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (5 responses)

> That's why people are still writing TCL/TK

That is one reason I still use it. That and documentation.

Challenge: Point me to a source for hardcopy documentation to develop a GNOME application. Can't, can you. Now in a scripting language.

Closest I came was an online GTK+ 2.x in Python document that looked pretty good but GTK isn't GNOME. All those wonderful GNOME technologies that churn almost annually and the only way one can learn how to use them correctly is to look at the source of an existing app and HOPE it is using it correctly since odds are that author learned the same way.

So last time I needed to knock out a graphical app for Linux I grabbed my worn copy of Practical Programming in TCL and Tk and got r done.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 20:36 UTC (Thu) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link] (2 responses)

http://www.amazon.com/Official-GNOME-Developers-Guide/dp/...

Is that good enough?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

It came out in 2004. The latest review on Amazon is from 2007. Whether what is in that book is of any use with current GNOME is anybody's guess.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 19, 2011 22:44 UTC (Sat) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link]

Nope. As someone else has already noted it is old. It is also out of print. Even the web docs on www.gnome.org are bad. Describing a libraries under a banner noting it's deprecation. And look at the language bindings.

C? Duh.

C++ also looks well maintained.

Java? Tutorials "Coming Soon" for about five years now. "has been used to develop non-trivial applications" and "coverage level is reaching maturity" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence to jump in and find out what works and what doesn't while developing code intended for production.

Perl? "Our documentation isn't what we'd like it to be..." is truthful. A look around leads me to think most of the GNOME APIs are supported at some level.

Python? A lot of GNOME apps are written in Python so one would think there would be documentation out there.... one would be mistaken. All pointers in the FAQ are to information dated between 2001 and 2003 so considering how many APIs have been deprecated since then...

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 19, 2011 23:47 UTC (Sat) by dbnichol (subscriber, #39622) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry, but that's not a fair assessment. TCL/TK, like GTK+, is a _toolkit_ not a desktop environment. I can't think of any desktop environment based on TK that you could still write a program for today.

Tcl/Tk

Posted Mar 21, 2011 15:36 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I can't think of any desktop environment based on TK that you could still write a program for today.

I don't know of any desktop environments based on Tk, period. However, I love Tcl/Tk and I think the GNOME developers could learn a lot by studying it. Here's why:

Tcl/Tk has extensive and well-written documentation in good old UNIX troff format. The API is completely documented both at the Tcl level and at the C integration level.
The C code is very clean and well-documented.
Tcl/Tk has continued to evolve over the decades, but retains the essence of what Tcl and Tk are. New features are carefully considered and added, but only when they fit in with the existing design philosophy. There's never been a "the entire Universe has changed" release of Tcl/Tk. GNOME could do well to study this last point.