The 800-pound Gorilla in the room

Charles Brauer — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 16:32:31 +0000

Hey guys,

I’m going to turn a flame-thrower on. You guys may not like what I have to say.

I’m writing this post because of a message that I just received from the developer of Glimmer.jl. Please read Issues · galran/Glimmer.jl (github.com). This message is a real shame because Glimmer is a beautiful piece of work.

Let me describe an 800-pound gorilla that is in the Julia room. I am disappointed that members of the Julia community cannot see the gorilla, or maybe they just don’t want to acknowledge it. The gorilla is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and an Integrate Development for the GUI.

Apple came into prominence 40 years ago because of its revolutionary GUI. And soon after, so did Microsoft. I am a veteran of Laptop/Desktop application development on Apple and Microsoft platforms. In the early days of Apple, we had to use Objective C, which was the bastard child of Bjarne Stroustrup’s C++. My point here is that Apple proved that the GUI was more important than the language used to implement it.

In the early days of Microsoft desktop development we had to use "Basic". Need I say more...

The reason I’m currently looking into Julia is because of the hell that Microsoft is putting their developers through. Over the years, Microsoft has developed several GUI technologies and Microsoft has finally decided to unify all their GUI systems into a single GUI. It is at the expense of developers like me. They are causing us to completely re-write our entire codebase. However, if Microsoft achieves their goal, they will become a true powerhouse.

I am very discouraged by what I see in the Julia community. At present, Julia developers seem to be content with command-line shell programming. I acknowledge impressive Julia packages like “Makie” that capitalize on the frustration of using Python’s Matplotlib. But this work is not a GUI.

I tried using “Gtk”, but quickly realized that it implements only about 20% of the Tk toolkit, and there does not seem to be any further work on “Gtk”.

Doing application development using a browser is like building a house on quicksand. Web developers do not control their environment. Apple and Microsoft control the environment.

There is a saying in computer development: “Keep up or get out of the way”. Julia package developers don’t understand this axiom.

Charles
Cbrauer@CypressPoint.com

Julia Community 🟣: Charles Brauer

The 800-pound Gorilla in the room