Re: [9fans] Limbo Tk FAQ?

["Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net>]

Lucio De Re wrote:
> ... I find graphics programming far too tedious.
> Is it all a matter of language idioms, then?

I've been programming computer graphics since the 1960s.
There have been *numerous* attempts to streamline use of
graphics, e.g. a plotting subroutine that is given a user
function and domain limits and then auto-scales and plots
it without further user programming.  Unfortunately, such
attempts have usually imposed a particular model for how
the specific use falls into an overall framework, and the
overall frameworks change from time to time, invalidating
the model and thus obsoleting the previous generic support
("graphics libraries").

Current commercial GUIs are, first of all, raster oriented,
but more significantly, they tend to be "object oriented"
in order to provide default characteristics (framework)
which can be overridden as necessary in order to support
specific application usage.  Of course, at the lower
levels there has to be some form of support for drawing
rectangles, characters, etc. but if there is sufficient
intermediate-level support the higher-level code doesn't
have to worry about low-level operations.  The down side
is that if details really matter to you, such interfaces
usually make it hard to force the details to come out the
way you want; their assumption is that you will accept the
default framework (Motif or whatever).

Other approaches are feasible; two that I use on my home
computer are S-Plus (commercial version of S, which has a
freeware implementation called R) and Mathematica.  These
provide generic frameworks that are fairly easy to use
and allow the user to work much more in the application
"problem domain" (interactive data analysis or mathematics
research, respectively) as opposed to graphics programming
per se.  If I had more spare time, I'd port R to Plan 9.