Notices by Victorian Sparkgap Kitsune (enkiv2@niu.moe), page 7

@dvddpl @enkiv2 the web isn't even good for hosting static documents! (what i mean by "html is a mistake".)

@a_breakin_glass @enkiv2 the train-sized drilling robot is a proper scripting language with a proper UI framework not running in a web browser and installed via a package manager

@a_breakin_glass @enkiv2 i think it's extracting adjectives and adjective/adverb sequences from a corpus or something. it says cuttlefish are "monstrous" and "extraordinarily well-adapted"

@a_breakin_glass @enkiv2 I guess. Honestly the toothpick equivalent doesn't matter because THEY SHOULD USE A GODDAMNED TRAIN-SIZED DRILLING ROBOT, LIKE SOMEBODY WHO CONSIDERED THE PROBLEM FOR A SECOND WOULD DO.

Web app developers: OF COURSE I DIG THESE TRAIN TUNNELS WITH A JEWEL-ENCRUSTED GOLD DECORATIVE COCKTAIL FORK. EVERYBODY DOES. WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO USE, A TOOTHPICK?

SOME PEOPLE HAVE POINTED OUT THAT WRITING APPS IN POSTSCRIPT IS SANE-ISH. THIS IS TRUE. IT'S HARD TO COME UP WITH COMPARABLE SITUATIONS THAT ARE MORE ABSURD, BECAUSE WE COLLECTIVELY DID THE ABSOLUTE WORST THING AND THEN CONVINCED OURSELVES IT WAS OK.

@stolas
using any of the many many cross-platform UI toolkits that have bindings to every popular scripting language.

you can even enable sandboxing in most of these languages, if that's a concern!

A hack that can barely properly represent documents should not be used to represent complicated interactive systems, particularly when doing so involves self-modifying code and gigs of wasted ram

@enkiv2 @saper Yeah. Writing applications as postscript actually makes a lot more sense than html+js. I was having a hard time finding a comparable thing that's actually more absurd. Maybe "All FPSes should be developed to run only inside word processor 'print preview' functions"

Describing Words - Find Adjectives to Describe Things http://describingwords.io/

Web application design is like a generation of people looked at that text adventure written in postscript and said LETS WRITE ALL FIRST PERSON SHOOTERS IN POSTSCRIPT EMBEDDED IN SELF-MODIFYING LATEX DOCUMENTS FOREVER

If you cannot use it to trivially put a pixel at an X,Y coordinate, YOU SHOULD NOT WRITE A COMPLEX UI IN IT, EXCEPT AS A JOKE.

HTML is a mistake. Generating HTML is a bigger mistake. Generating HTML at runtime as a display layer for interactive applications is the basis for modern UIs & I want to cry

@natecull @duck57 @bobstechsite @Canageek @gemlog @kensanata
TK fails (but still comes out on top) and this makes me really sad.

I want UI toolkits to be a domain where the best possible choice is something I want to use & feels like it's helping me instead of getting in my way!

@kensanata @gemlog @Canageek @bobstechsite @duck57 @natecull
Ten years is a massive underestimate.

I stopped using TCL for my TK code 10 years ago. TK has barely changed in that time, and it was already ~15 years behind the other big UI libraries in 2008.

Now, I value TK a lot. But, what I want is an API-consistent TK with support for modern base-level features (like alpha, drawing outside of a window, and widgets that aren't square) while retaining the portability.

@natecull @duck57 @bobstechsite @Canageek @gemlog @kensanata
The name of the tcl interpreter with tk pre-loaded is "wish" for "windowing shell", and "windowing shell" is exactly what we are WISHing for, but tk stopped far short (and also never went in the other direction).

But, all of these reasons are why when I was 14 I tried to do my smalltalk-vm-like "desktop environment" in tcl+tk.

@kensanata @gemlog @Canageek @bobstechsite @duck57 @natecull
Tk is still extremely widely supported. Unfortunately, Tk widgets are internally inconsistent about their interfaces, features are limited to what was in X in the late 80s (so no alpha), flexibility that's conceptually nice but nobody thought of is missing (widgets can't overlap, even on canvases, and canvases & text panes can't embed themselves or each other as sub-objects).