Re: [rgui-dev] Clairvoyance

[Tom Sawyer]

On Wed, 2002-08-28 at 14:17, Massimiliano Mirra wrote:
> >From WordNet (r) 1.7 [wn]:
> 
>   clairvoyance
>        n : apparent power to perceive things that are not present to
>            the senses [syn: {second sight}, {extrasensory perception},
>             {ESP}, {esp}]

ceratinly i would like to give GUtopIa as much of this as possible, but
as with all code, it comes from somewhere. it's not magic.

if you recall that when i started this about a month ago, i began with
the idea of making a mixin that GUIized my objects. well, i beleieve it
was you who told me that my approach was too tight knit, too
view-in-model. and i agreed, and still do. so in thinking further i
realize one can only go so far. how wonderful it would be to just say,
'computer, make me a gui for objext x.' and that was it. but short of
having Cmdr. Data around, it ain't going to happen. so we have to be
realistic in just how far we can take our Meta-API in that direction. at
some point you come to a place where you simply have to teach the
computer far too much to get just the most basic of results out of a
simpler command set, and so it turns out that to get the job done it is
better just to do a few extra things by hand, then take the long road of
"AI computer education".

so it boils down to this. GUtopIa will have a GUI API much like other
GUI API's. no it won't be "Clairvoyant", but it will be "Meta", and thus
outshine the other's by a far cry. i have given much thought to making
the API "determine the widget by the datatype" but when you get down to
it, that saves you about one or two lines of code at best. you still
have to give it an idea as to where to locate on the screen, where to
fit in with the other components, and other such parameters. so...

indeed you will say something like

  awindow = Window.new

and indeed we will have yaml/xml markup to use.

and thanks to FreeRIDE we will even end up with a Visual GUI Builder.

is that enough of a future vision for us to start work on the Meta-API?

thanks for the perspective Massimiliano,
a very good "step back and look at the big pitcure"

~transami