Comments | pmb: GUI Programming rant gone long (nerds only)

pmb

GUI Programming rant gone long (nerds only)

Feb 21, 2007 18:56

If given the choice between programming a WIMP graphical user interface and repeatedly punching yourself in the junk, I say go for the junk punching.

I'm trying to make a low budget one of these using a webcam and a laser pointer and a normal projector ( and it's not working and it's very frustrating )

tech frustration

Comments 17

joyquality February 22 2007, 04:34:15 UTC

The professors in my program have explicitly told us that being able to trawl through miles of bad code is a good job skill. We are therefore required to use these gigantic packages where the only documentation is comments in the source code that say things like "Ack! Fix this!" (Fix what? Who knows?) It's so miserable that the best lesson we're learning is how to do as much as we can ourselves and only touch the provided package if we absolutely have to in order to complete the assignment.

joyquality February 22 2007, 04:40:57 UTC

I guess the one good thing is that they are big on open source, so we always have access to the source code. Without that we'd be lost.

pmb February 22 2007, 05:30:55 UTC

What a perfect way to turn people away from the major. And they are teaching the wrong lesson, too. Because the fixes that happen in this eldritch bass-ackwards way, while they solve little irritants, contribute to the problem in the long run. We need to make things simpler, not more complicated. Working around crap code is good for assignments, but it's bad in the workplace. There the right approach is to fix the original damn problem ( ... )

mycrust February 22 2007, 20:25:13 UTC

Time for my uninformed half-assed comment for the day:

I wonder if the modern software engineer might actually have inadvertently developed an excellent intuition for how to think about "systems biology" issues related to the organization of biological networks. After all, redundancy with slight changes, kludgey workarounds, new features strapped on top of substrates that were never meant to handle them and undocumented bugs that only become relevant when circumstances change sounds... well... a lot like a description of how evolution by natural selection might work.

Thread 5

boojum February 22 2007, 04:45:15 UTC

I looked a little at Objective C, but came away with the impression that it made you manage your own memory without giving you enough control to be able to do so. I'm simultaneously glad and sad that you think so too. (It's comforting to be agreed with, but if I were wrong, it'd be easier to write native Mac programs and widget backends and such.)

(The comment has been removed)

pmb February 22 2007, 05:31:48 UTC

Give me a week or two and I should have an implementation that works in Java using cheap hardware. Because I totally agree.

conform February 22 2007, 06:07:20 UTC

i have thoughts on this but i ain't leaving 'em here. ask me for them and you'll get an alcoholic beverage for your troubles.

minorninth February 22 2007, 06:29:13 UTC

Wait, why again can't you do this from C/C++? At one point Apple was trying to force everyone to use Objective-C for everything, but then they relented and now everything can be accessed from a C API. Well, not every last widget, but definitely something like accessing a webcam using the low-level API. I wrote a program just last year that captured images from an iSight attached to my Powerbook. Worked great. Not a single line of Objective-C, just C/C++.

Email me if you'd like to see the code.