On Thursday, 25 October 2018 at 08:06:32 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> You can never expand your market-share by focusing on a shrinking market. And there are two ways a market segment can shrink (absolute). It can get smaller itself (absolute), or it can just not grow while the overall market expands (relative). I think native toolkits are shrinking relative to the overall market. But either way, never chase the shrinking market. Especially when the tool that supports the growing market is a superset of the shrinking tool.

When reading this thread, I was going to make the same point about shrinking markets, except towards the opposite aim that the GUI toolkit market itself is not worth pursuing. The software market that is actually growing worldwide is one stripped of chrome, where you simply build a software service on an existing text or voice-based platform, like WeChat in China or Alexa/Google-Assistant in the west:

https://qz.com/1331650/an-app-built-just-for-wechat-hints-at-googles-new-china-plan/

Attempts have been made to replicate WeChat's success in other countries, such as with the Google Assistant, Allo, or Siri, but obviously it hasn't taken off in the US... yet:

https://www.wired.com/2015/08/time-to-ditch-texting/

Everybody believes that is just a matter of time though, and with speakers and other home-based connected hardware taking off, the importance of voice-driven software interaction is only increasing. That's why people are now writing strategic analyses of how the big players are doing in this fast-growing and important market:

https://stratechery.com/2018/the-battle-for-the-home/

Building your own GUI toolkit is very much an '80s or '90s mindset, back when that was paramount. It isn't anymore, and would be a waste of time to try with D.

Of course, there's always going to be a small and lucrative niche of people using old-fashioned apps written with a GUI toolkit, just as there's still people running COBOL, so if you really want to build for that shrinking market, go for it. But I think it would be a mistake for the D community to spend too much of its meager resources on that backward-looking market.

On 28/10/2018 8:03 PM, Joakim wrote:
> Building your own GUI toolkit is very much an '80s or '90s mindset, back when that was paramount. It isn't anymore, and would be a waste of time to try with D.

WIMP dates back to the 60's in a fully functional state.

It isn't going anywhere.

On Sunday, 28 October 2018 at 07:08:33 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> On 28/10/2018 8:03 PM, Joakim wrote:
>> Building your own GUI toolkit is very much an '80s or '90s mindset, back when that was paramount. It isn't anymore, and would be a waste of time to try with D.
>
> WIMP dates back to the 60's in a fully functional state.
>
> It isn't going anywhere.

Oh, I never said it is: I explicitly said it will always be around like COBOL. When's the last time you wrote any COBOL or interviewed for a COBOL job? Exactly. :)

On 28/10/2018 8:12 PM, Joakim wrote:
> On Sunday, 28 October 2018 at 07:08:33 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
>> On 28/10/2018 8:03 PM, Joakim wrote:
>>> Building your own GUI toolkit is very much an '80s or '90s mindset, back when that was paramount. It isn't anymore, and would be a waste of time to try with D.
>>
>> WIMP dates back to the 60's in a fully functional state.
>>
>> It isn't going anywhere.
> 
> Oh, I never said it is: I explicitly said it will always be around like COBOL. When's the last time you wrote any COBOL or interviewed for a COBOL job? Exactly. :)

The last time I worked with COBOL was 4 years ago when I wrote a parser for it.

There is still a very large market for COBOL developers: https://www.cobol-it.com/

On Sunday, 28 October 2018 at 07:19:11 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> 
> The last time I worked with COBOL was 4 years ago when I wrote a parser for it.
>
> There is still a very large market for COBOL developers: https://www.cobol-it.com/

I just had vision of Andrei, waking up after a nightmare, pouring with sweat and his wife says to him 'whats wrong, what's wrong' and he says 'i had a nightmare. D reached 1 million developers' and she says ' I thought that's what you wanted' and he says 'they were all ex-COBOL developers'

On 28/10/2018 8:27 PM, Abdulhaq wrote:
> 
> I just had vision of Andrei, waking up after a nightmare, pouring with sweat and his wife says to him 'whats wrong, what's wrong' and he says 'i had a nightmare. D reached 1 million developers' and she says ' I thought that's what you wanted' and he says 'they were all ex-COBOL developers'

That is certainly chuckle worthy. But at least the foundation would have a lot of money to splash around giving them what they want!

On Sunday, 28 October 2018 at 07:19:11 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> On 28/10/2018 8:12 PM, Joakim wrote:
>> On Sunday, 28 October 2018 at 07:08:33 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
>>> On 28/10/2018 8:03 PM, Joakim wrote:
>>>> Building your own GUI toolkit is very much an '80s or '90s mindset, back when that was paramount. It isn't anymore, and would be a waste of time to try with D.
>>>
>>> WIMP dates back to the 60's in a fully functional state.
>>>
>>> It isn't going anywhere.
>> 
>> Oh, I never said it is: I explicitly said it will always be around like COBOL. When's the last time you wrote any COBOL or interviewed for a COBOL job? Exactly. :)
>
> The last time I worked with COBOL was 4 years ago when I wrote a parser for it.

Then you're the exception, as I suspect most programmers are like me and have never even seen it.

> There is still a very large market for COBOL developers: https://www.cobol-it.com/

I agree that it's still a surprisingly large market, as COBOL is still part of key infrastructure, particularly in finance and government:

"In the US, around 80 percent of in-person transactions and 95 percent of ATM swipes are based on programs written in COBOL. The problem is there’s not enough people to maintain the current COBOL-based systems.

According to Reuters, around three trillion dollars in daily commerce flow through COBOL systems. Many major financial corporations and some parts of the federal government have built their entire infrastructure on COBOL bases from the 70s and 80s."
https://thenextweb.com/finance/2017/04/10/ancient-programming-language-cobol-can-make-you-bank-literally/

Similarly, I think WIMP will be around for decades for certain kinds of software, but it will simply be dwarfed by sales of software that's driven by voice, just as mobile device sales now dwarf PC sales:

https://twitter.com/lukew/status/842397687420923904

So like Adam said, should D focus on that shrinking GUI market or the growing text/voice mobile market? Obviously the latter deserves much more emphasis.

That doesn't stop Adam or anyone who wants to do GUIs or COBOL from going their own way, I'm just cautioning that it wouldn't be a good direction for the D community to pour much resources into, ie the 5 paid developers he references.

On Sunday, 28 October 2018 at 07:30:54 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> On 28/10/2018 8:27 PM, Abdulhaq wrote:
>> 
>> I just had vision of Andrei, waking up after a nightmare, pouring with sweat and his wife says to him 'whats wrong, what's wrong' and he says 'i had a nightmare. D reached 1 million developers' and she says ' I thought that's what you wanted' and he says 'they were all ex-COBOL developers'
>
> That is certainly chuckle worthy. But at least the foundation would have a lot of money to splash around giving them what they want!

So was the COBOL parser for profit or pleasure? Was a compiler ever written? What did you write the parser in? I did a COBOL training course in Chicago in 1986 and  wrote the programs on a type of grid paper. I guess it's changed a bit since then :-).

On 29/10/2018 9:28 AM, Abdulhaq wrote:
> On Sunday, 28 October 2018 at 07:30:54 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
>> On 28/10/2018 8:27 PM, Abdulhaq wrote:
>>>
>>> I just had vision of Andrei, waking up after a nightmare, pouring with sweat and his wife says to him 'whats wrong, what's wrong' and he says 'i had a nightmare. D reached 1 million developers' and she says ' I thought that's what you wanted' and he says 'they were all ex-COBOL developers'
>>
>> That is certainly chuckle worthy. But at least the foundation would have a lot of money to splash around giving them what they want!
> 
> So was the COBOL parser for profit or pleasure? Was a compiler ever written? What did you write the parser in? I did a COBOL training course in Chicago in 1986 and  wrote the programs on a type of grid paper. I guess it's changed a bit since then :-).

Both profit and pleasure (never completed it).
It meant I didn't have to manually port some code.

And yeah its changed a bit, quite a few different specs all quite different in slight ways.

On Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 06:20:05 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> I know that this topic can bring out the rage-trolls

Not a rage troll, just a sad troll.

One that remembers a time when graphics and visualization and UI design was fun and easy to do.

> At this point in time HTML/CSS/JS is by far the most prevalent UX toolkit in use today and not a single modern website uses the native widget theme. The bare minimum is Bootstrap.

Sadly, true. Standardization was abandoned, killed, stabbed in the back.

And now we live in the worst of all worlds. You need to understand a vast pile of standards, and a vast pile of half documented 3rd party libraries on top of the standards... and like hapless princesses in distress, we're left to cry "Help me Stack Overflow, you're my only Hope".

> I think this is a key point. The theme itself is now part of a brand and using the native toolkit would be a branding disaster. American Express, Facebook, or Google aren't in the business of showcasing Microsoft's, GNOME's, or Apple's branding, they want their apps to showcase their own brands.

Ah yes, the pixel pushers. Sadly, they have won.

> *At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.*
> Tony Hoare

> There are other reasons that native toolkits died however. The first is data visualization. What can be expressed in 10 lines of WPF code would take anywhere from 100-1000 of Win32 code to depending on the visualization.

D3.js has this property too.... but I despair of it. If you peek under the hood of D3 or WPF to try and understand why something isn't working the way you thought it should..... "Help me please Stack Overflow, you're my only Hope".

> The second is Electron. Electron is a terrible framework for a host of reasons. But the one thing that it achieved is the write-once-run-anywhere (WORA) desktop UX toolkit.

Once there was a vision, a brilliant vision, semantic markup to describe the parts of a document, style sheets to guide the presentation, and rendering engine to make it look "fairly" good on any display, any aspect ratio, any display any user choice of font and fontsize.

And then the "Optimized for 800x600, must be pixel perfect always!" crowd came along.

And WORA cease to mean WORA. It mean must do exactly the same pixel perfect things everywhere.

Ah! I remember the glory days of The Zen Garden of CSS.... anything could be achieved by styling.

Except they lied, under the hood it was all <div>'s and images.

> You run into a plethora of minor issues surrounding differing Fonts/Paddings/Margins etc. So even though the toolkit itself may be cross platform you still need to create three separate interfaces to iron out these small but noticeable details.

And there the brilliant vision is lost. Instead of semantic markup and styling hints, rendered "Good Enough" everywhere, the demand for pixel perfect rendition, pixel identical everywhere and the users preferences be damned.

> Native toolkits are a dead-end. The future of non-Web UX is non-native.

As I say, I'm not a rage troll.

I am a sad troll.

I am sad and miss the good old days when tossing off a visualization was ten minutes work, simple and fun, and I could peek under the hood all the way down to the machine code and understand what was going on.

And fix it.

> Then there is the fact that by definition, any UX toolkit requires an absolutely gargantuan number of interfaces to achieve the desired result. My DirectX interface is tiny compared to the Win32 UX interfaces, and it's something like 16000 lines of D code, without macros.
>
> And none of this is even counting the tooling ecosystem that would be recreate from scratch. Qt has QML, WPF and UWP have different flavors of XAML. There are special pre-compilers. The list goes on. So when individual sets out to bind a UX toolkit they inevitably flame-out because the amount of effort required to get something simple working is enormous.

The saddest day of my programming life was when Windows 3 came out and I found out how much cruft I had to write to say "Hello World"

These days I keep as far away from UX gargantua as I can.... because touching it will swallow months of economic effort for very very little useful return.

> The way I see it. We either pull together around a unified vision for a UX toolkit written in D from the ground-up or we wait (im)patiently for a benevolent corporate benefactor to appear. It's that simple.

Or consciously relinquish the pursuit of pixel perfection and "the theme itself is now part of a brand" and aim for semantic simplicity.

And make programming fun and useful again.

> This isn't the first time I've asked for help. And to be perfectly honest, I expect the same crickets response I've gotten before, but if you are interested and willing to dedicate yourself. Please let me know.


Good luck Sir Knight, that windmill you are charging is vast and unforgiving.