[Gambas-devel] Creating a Control

John Leake jleake at ...741...
Wed Sep 10 14:36:31 CEST 2014


> I believe a newbie should take time to explore things themselves and make
> lots of errors. The frustration one experiences helps to remember important
> points ;-) -- that's at least what served me well enough and I always found
> the fruits to be rewarding.
This will exclude all those users that do not want to have to learn what
maybe a new language to them, when all they wish to do is create a GUI
program that does something and helps them in their problem domain.
> With time comes a good understanding of how the Gambas system "thinks" about
> your code and you can understand more advanced topics with great ease.
Some newbie users do not care about how things are done internally.
> like the analogy to... Mathematics: if you're a normal person, you _need_ to
> go through vast amounts of exercises to get a feeling for your objects and
> ideas.
This is not Mathematics. Gambas is an IDE for writing programs that do
stuff.
> You must understand: That's the way I went and since I'm content with it,
> my reflex is to try to impose it on others.
Sorry if my comments sound like criticism.  They are definitely not.
And yes I understand I used to be like that.
> just to learn a programming language so your attempts are very appreciated.
Thank you.

I just have a wider view of what could make up a user base.  If you
create a system that exposes technical details unnecessarily then you
end up with a technically orientated user base. Everyone else will just
run a mile.

As some food for thought, take controlling form layout for example. I
think there is plenty of scope for improvement in this area.  The low
level layout mechanisms in the graphics libraries (qt, GTK etc) are just
that, i.e. 'low level'.  With a little more abstraction the same results
can be achieved whilst hiding the nasty details of their implementation.

> I already talked about it. It's a mailing list dedicated to questions about
> programming *in* Gambas. 
Sorry I did not see the connection.

> make custom controls, feature requests and everything that has to do with
> writing code in Gambas, as opposed to gambas-devel (which we're currently
> at) which is for questions related to contributions/internals and programming
> *for* Gambas (mostly in C/C++). 

I am hoping to improve the IDE and make it more accessible to a wider
audience.  I assumed the devel. mailing list was the correct place for
me to get started.

> I keep CC'ing them because I think this
> discussion is relevant to that list mostly. Also the people there are _the_
> users of the IDE and may have opinions/suggestions.
I don’t' really care where they end up but If I am in the wrong place
then just tell me.

As Gambas stands now I bet the majority of your users are all technical.
 But what about the future. Be brave and abstract your knowledge of the
terribly complicated details (which are irrelevant to some people) and
empower them with simple drag n drop.  I must state again that I am not
criticising I am just observing that the pretty good architecture of the
IDE facilitates the creation of a much higher view that can be presented
to the user.

Best regards,
John




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