Re: GWindows and David Botton

["Alexander E. Kopilovich" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu>]

Stephen Leake wrote:

> There was a distinct feeling that the Ada community in general would
> benefit from going forward with only _one_ thick Windows binding,
> because that would enhance the level of support for that binding (both
> in terms of user experience and developers fixing problems and adding
> features). 

Don't you think that essentially the same feeling tells that it must be
better for society if it has exactly one political party, and not two or
three? And that it is wrong for essentially the same reasons.

You have to choose between that determinism and popularity. If you choose
determinism that stop lamenting about being unpopular. Such determinism may
be very effective in some aspects, but it can be popular for short time only
(and this time was over long ago for Ada), because broad community faces
too broad spectre of problems and circumstances.

But if we descend from those general speculations to more specific
essentials, we can notice, that while CLAW is an example of thick Ada
binding in its purpose, the proclaimed purpose of GWindows/GNAVI is
essentially different. The latter seems to strive to be not just another
classical Ada binding, but a Delphi-like thing (if you never tried Delphi
then you probably can't imagine what it means) - a tool with which your
program binds to rich objects, and that binding is not just to some API,
but explicitly involves ontology of those objects... so, it may be seen
as a binding at ontological level (at least partially).

I can't say that I believe that GWindows/GNAVI have bright perspective -
I have some doubts about it (and some of them relate to Ada language itself),
but the purpose is surely very attractive (whether it is attainable - this
is another matter). And I'm sure that even if GWindows/GNAVI succeed and
reach the level of Delphi 2/3 there still always will be a good place for
some classical Ada binding for Win32 - such as CLAW.




Alexander Kopilovich                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia