About GUI and IDE Interface

[Marc-Antoine Parent]

>> Sounds absolutely brilliant, and I'd hate to sound critical of what is 
>> obviously a fine effort... But I'm a bit miffed that you selected 
>> .NET, because I live in another platform world (Mac OS X, in my case), 
>> and some linux projects notwithstanding, it's fair to say that your 
>> efforts will be unaccessible to a lot of the Mozart constituency, 
>> which is also unix-based.

> One compelling reason why I considered C# was the presence of Mono (the
> platform (www.go-mono.com), not the contagion) on Unix, which is a Unix
> implementation of .NET, with emphasis on C#.

Yes, I was referring to mono.... Which is still very much 
work-in-progress as it is. And I am not sure how many unices it will be 
ported to. Mac OS X is actually a likely target platform, but I was 
trying to think beyond my own needs.

> So, believe it or don't I did have cross-platform issues in mind when I
> picked C#.

:-)
(I cannot but remember the original .NET marketese, saying how it would 
enable multi-platform development: Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 
XP... But I agree that mono gives hope of a broader horizon.)

> Another related factor was the influence of Anders Heijlsberg (however 
> his
> name is spelled), he's the guy who invented Delphi and C++ Builder for
> Borland before going to Microsoft to architect C# and .NET. ... So that 
> was an inducement too.

Instructive. I have never gone the Borland route, but I've heard good 
things of Delphi. BTW, much as I hate C# because of all it plagiarizes, 
the end result has some strong points. But also the characteristics of 
much from microsoft: really easy to do basic projects, really hard to do 
anything slightly different than what M$ thought you would want to do. 
(Oh, and mysterious bugs galore of course.) But an IDE is a fairly 
straightforward project (though otherwise daunting), I understand C#'s 
attractiveness.

> I thought about Java but I'm not a fan of Java GUIs in general. Frankly 
> I'm
> forced to write Java GUI code now at work, and one of my motivations is 
> to
> get away from it. ;)

Well, that is precisely why I think you should look deeper into Eclipse. 
They use neither the AWT nor Swing, but their own widget toolkit called 
SWT. Though that raises the porting issue that mono raised, consider 
that SWT, unlike mono, is not following a closed-source moving target... 
Also, it is much better designed (IMHO) than either swing or AWT. 
(Basically: The versatility of Swing but using native widgets like AWT, 
so much lighter.) Give it a serious look before you give up on java GUI 
development, if things are still in flux. Another advantage is that you 
would only have write the mozart-specific code, Eclipse would handle all 
common IDE tasks. Maybe you would not even write much UI code!

However, my intent is _not_ to condemn your C# effort: Any effort is 
good. Just trying to cast some more light on options you may have not 
thought about, and asking if it were possible to reuse some algorithms 
(I've never written a complex parser, for example) from your tool to a 
very similar language I happen to like much about, and can run now. ;-)

Marc-Antoine

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