Re: really attracting developers

[phil taylor]

On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 14:58 +0200, joekewoud_@joekewoud.nl wrote:

> >
> > nextstep is all about the vertical menus and left hand vertical scroll
> > bar. its a complete ui design and it does not fit in windows. make it
> > behave like windows and you just reinvented windows.

Seriously? All that API wizardry, and the entire object oriented
framework is just there so you can put the scroll bar on the left and
have a detached menu? This is a very trivial assessment, and by
definition total nonsense.

Surely GNUStep is mainly about the application development framework -
thats what GNUstep actually is - and how it enables one to develop
applications very quickly and very reliably.

Personally I think the detached menus and certain other aspects of the
GUI, but especially the floating menus, are ugly and quite off putting.
I cannot imagine why anyone would think they are a good idea.

I would imagine the look of the GNUstep gui is one of the main reasons
GNUstep is nowhere near as popular as it could be. The other main reason
would have to be the lack of a simple and effective way to install it.

I have just managed to get it working on Debian and am not very
impressed. Even though there is a package in the Debian repos, not all
the set up is done (environment path variables not configured). There
appear to be not so much as a single sample program - goodness knows it
wouldnt take a GNUstep developer more than a few minutes to knock up
some simple sample programs.

The documentation supplied is incomplete - just a ragged collection of
bits and bobs. Not of much use to a newbie.

Despite these other objections, I have decided agaisnt using it (so far)
on account of Objective-C rather than GNUstep per se. The object
features have an obvious bolted-on look to them. Class definition syntax
is a real alphabet soup. The code looks really unreadable. The only idea
I like is the named parameters, but the object structure itself does not
look very elegant.

Think I will go with SmartEiffel and GTK+.



> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss-gnustep mailing list
> Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep